The world’s population will pass the 8 billion mark in November 2022 and India is due to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation in 2023, five years earlier than previous estimations. How can teachers use these milestone events to teach their students?
Going past 8 billion, India to pass China
Teachers should always be alert to incorporate interesting news into our subjects and in this way educate learners on how to be attentive to what is happening in the world that we live in.
So, the fact that the global population will reach 8 billion around 15 November 2022, and India will pass China’s population in 2023, opens a myriad (not really, how much is a myriad?) of opportunities to talk about related topics depending on the subject and level of the students.
Especially teachers of English (both EFL and ESL, also online), math, history, and economics teachers can elaborate on the facts about the global population going past 8 billion and India surpassing China from the 2022 World Population Prospects of the United Nations released in July 2022.
It took 123 years for the population to double from one to two billion in 1927. Going from seven to eight billion took only eleven years!
World Live Population
The following website offers a live clock showing the growth of the world population by the second – births outnumbering deaths. It also provides information for the twenty biggest nations on the planet. They are:
1. China 1,450,752,836
2. India 1,408,292,900
3. U.S.A. 335,012,460
4. Indonesia 279,564,582
5. Pakistan 230,038,857
6. Brazil 215,689,883
7. Nigeria 217,175,689
8. Bangladesh 168,111,408
9. Russia 146,062,121
10. Mexico 131,761,581
11. Japan 125,692,885
12. Ethiopia 121,114,450
13. Philippines 112,646,851
14. Egypt 106,444,929
15. Vietnam 99,161,102
16. D.R. Congo 95,523,863
17. Turkey 86,235,367
18. Iran 86,250,056
19. Germany 84,333,983
20. Thailand 70,159,010
Teaching about Big Numbers
While on the issue of BIG numbers, the difference between a ‘British billion’ and the American billion that only became the norm in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
Many other languages outside of English also use derivatives of the word “milliard” for the American billion. Millions of English speakers in Asia also use the very handy Hindi terms “lakh” (100,000) and “crore” (ten million; one hundred lakhs, especially of rupees).
The following video teaches about the development of big number words: “When a hundred wasn’t 100.”
