Human and Population Geography
Core concepts
Human geography examines the relationship between population, culture, settlement and space. Begin with population data: census, vital registration, and sample surveys; then measures such as crude birth and death rates, total fertility rate, infant mortality, life expectancy, and dependency ratio. Understand the demographic transition model (five stages), its critique for developing countries where death rates fell without industrialisation, and the population pyramid as a diagnostic tool. Know Malthusian and Bosrupian arguments, the Neo-Malthusian critique, and the concept of optimum population. Settlement geography covers rural-urban continuum, urban hierarchy (Christaller's central place theory), primate cities, rank-size rule, urban land-use models (concentric zone, sector, multiple nuclei) and migration theories (push-pull, Ravenstein's laws, Lee's model). Cultural geography adds language families, religion diffusion, and ethnicity.
Traps
Examiners frequently test the difference between growth rate and natural increase (the latter excludes net migration). Do not confuse the dependency ratio with the sex ratio, and remember that a declining birth rate can still mean a rising absolute population because of population momentum. A common error is labelling Bangladesh's pyramid as stage 4; it remains broad-based though narrowing.
Worked example
A country has CBR 22, CDR 6, immigration 2 per 1000, emigration 3 per 1000. Find the growth rate. Rule of thumb: growth = (CBR - CDR) + (immigration - emigration) per 1000. Here natural increase = 16, net migration = -1, so growth = 15 per 1000 = 1.5% per year. Doubling time by the rule of 70 is roughly 47 years.