Dangers of Overpopulation
The world’s population is growing by almost 80 million people every year. We will be facing many problems in the future:
Environment
- More and more people need room to live. They are taking away the living areas of animals and plants.
- Cities have problems making enough drinking water for thousands of people who want to start a new life there every year.
- Population in rural areas is growing too. People need more food and have to grow more crops on the same land. This means that the quality of the soil is getting worse and worse.
- More and more trees are being destroyed, especially in tropical regions. More carbon dioxide, which is usually taken up by trees, is now set free into the atmosphere. This leads to global warming.
Poverty
Population growth is highest in developing countries. Young people have to care for their parents and grandparents, so they have less money to buy the things that they need. They stay poor.
Africa is the fastest-growing continent on earth. But its people are getting poorer and poorer. Every third person in Africa doesn’t have enough to eat. The average African family has about 5 children.
Food and Water
The “ Green Revolution” of the 1960s and 70s has given farmers better methods and tools to grow crops and food. But ,still, they cannot produce enough to feed the growing population. Food will get expensive for these countries because some of them have to buy it from industrial countries. Many people die of starvation and millions more will die in the future.
In addition , about 400 million people all over the world live in places where there is not enough drinking water.
Unemployment
Many Third World countries have a high number of children or young people. Unemployment will be going up over the next decades, because the governments cannot create enough jobs to give work to its younger generation. Young people who can’t find any work sometimes try to get money by stealing, dealing with drugs or doing other illegal things. This might lead to social unrest in such countries.
World Population- Table of Contents
- Introduction and World Population Clock
- World Population Growth
- Population Density
- Population Pyramids
- Cities and Why People Live There
- One Child Policy in China
- Migration
- Status of Women in our World
- Ageing and its Problems
- Dangers of Overpopulation
Downloadable PDF Text- and Worksheets
Online Exercises
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World Population - Multiple Choice Exercise - World Population - Vocabulary Matching Exercise 1
- World Population - Vocabulary Matching Exercise 2
- Match the sentence halves
- Population Growth - Fill in the missing words
- Crossword
Related Topics
Words
- carbon dioxide = the gas that you produce when you breathe out or when you burn something
- care for = take care of
- create = make
- crops =a plant that farmers grow and use or sell as food
- deal = to buy and sell
- decade = ten years
- destroy =to damage completely
- developing countries = the poor countries of the Third World
- espec ially =above all
- face =have
- feed = to give food to a person or an animal
- global warming = it is getting warmer in the atmosphere because of more carbon dioxide
- Green Revolution = the time when farmers started producing more and more food because they had better machines
- growth =how something grows or gets bigger
- illegal = not allowed, against the law
- lead =to have something as a result
- methods = ways, systems
- population = the number of people living in a place
- rural = everything that has to do with the countryside
- set free =escape, move into
- social unrest = when people behave in a violent way
- soil = the top part of the earth on which crops can grow
- starvation = to die because you don’t have enough to eat
- take up =absorb
- tools =something that you hold in your hand and need to do a special job
- unemployment = if you cannot get a job