Core: Changing population practice questions.

More than 90 % of Egypt's population lived on about 5 % of the national territory in 2020, in a narrow strip along the Nile and its delta. Which physical factor is the main reason for this pattern at the national scale?

• Low relief and gentle gradients across the desert plateau
• A cooler microclimate created by evaporation from the river
• Reliable fresh water and fertile alluvial soils
• Shelter from prevailing winds provided by the delta

Answer: Reliable fresh water and fertile alluvial soils

Egypt's desert receives almost no rainfall, so settlement follows the only perennial water supply and the silt-enriched soils it deposits. Relief and wind shelter vary little across the country and therefore cannot explain the concentration.

A geographer comparing Norway and Nepal wants one measure that combines income with health and education outcomes rather than income alone. Which indicator should be chosen?

• Human Development Index (HDI)
• Gross national income per capita at purchasing power parity
• Gini coefficient
• Infant mortality rate

Answer: Human Development Index (HDI)

HDI is a composite of life expectancy, years of schooling and GNI per capita, so it captures social outcomes that a purely economic measure misses. The Gini coefficient describes the distribution of income, not its level.

The population pyramid of Qatar in 2020 shows a very wide bulge of males aged 25-44 set against a narrow female profile at the same ages. Which process best explains this shape?

• A recent and sustained baby boom
• Unusually high male infant mortality
• Large-scale contract labour immigration
• Emigration of young families with children

Answer: Large-scale contract labour immigration

Age-sex structure responds to migration as well as to births and deaths, and a sex-selective bulge confined to the economically active ages can only come from migration. No plausible change in fertility or mortality produces a distortion in one sex and one age band.

Filling the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, China required about 1.3 million valley residents to leave their homes between 1993 and 2008, while the electricity and the flood protection produced serve cities far downstream. Which statement best describes how the costs and benefits of this displacement were distributed?

• Displaced valley residents bore the costs; distant urban users gained the benefits
• Costs and benefits were shared evenly between the flooded valley and the downstream cities
• The resettled households themselves decided where the reservoir would be built
• Downstream cities bore the costs while the flooded valley gained cheap electricity

Answer: Displaced valley residents bore the costs; distant urban users gained the benefits

A forced migration question asks who decided and who gains, not only how many people moved: the resettlement was planned by the state and the benefits are consumed hundreds of kilometres away. Answers that stop at the number displaced describe the event without analysing power.

In Bangladesh the total fertility rate fell from about six children per woman in the mid-1970s to close to two by 2015, so the share of the population aged 15-64 is now unusually large and the dependent share small. Which opportunity does this age structure create, provided that schooling and jobs are available?

• A demographic dividend, a temporary period of unusually low dependency
• Population momentum, growth continuing after fertility reaches replacement
• A pro-natalist window in which births per woman begin to rise again
• An ageing crisis, with more retired people than people of working age

Answer: A demographic dividend, a temporary period of unusually low dependency

The dividend opens because fertility fell faster than the earlier large cohorts reached retirement, and it closes again as those cohorts age. It is an opportunity rather than an automatic gain: without employment and schooling the same age structure produces youth unemployment instead.

China's one-child policy operated from 1979 until 2015. Which demographic consequence for the 2030s and 2040s is most directly attributable to it?

• A rapid rise in the crude birth rate
• Fewer workers per retired person
• A fall in average life expectancy
• An increase in rural-to-urban migration

Answer: Fewer workers per retired person

Restricting births for a generation narrows the base of the age pyramid, so the cohorts now entering the workforce are smaller than the cohorts leaving it. Life expectancy and internal migration respond to health care and economic geography, not to a birth limit.