Geography and Culture

In the video, one of geographical concepts Hans Rosling talks about is total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in a country. Rosling used a chart to show multiple examples of this concept in the countries of the world. The question of if the average number of children has decreased over the last 50 years or increased. For example the total fertility rate in Qatar in 1971 was 7, whereas in 2010 it decreased all the way to 2. Multiple other countries had the same drastic decrease in TFR, which suggests that these countries around the world are becoming more developed which is significant when studying geography in knowing how fast a population is growing and developing. Another concept was infant mortality rate, which is the number of deaths per 1000 live births in the first year of life. Rosling suggests that in undeveloped countries, such as Congo and Afghanistan, have high total fertility rates due to large number of infant mortality rates. People in those countries have more children in order to cope with infant deaths, which in the long run raise the total fertility rate and contribute to overpopulation. But when countries have low infant mortality rates, it usually has a relation to a low total fertility rate. The significance to geography that infant mortality rate has is that it separates less developed countries from developed. When studying a country, infant mortality rates give a geographer a chance to learn exactly why it’s so high and even a chance to try to improve it. The final geographic concept that Rosling brings up is religion. He didn’t get into the exact details of different religions and what they entail, but mainly how different religions contribute to overpopulation and their different total fertility rates. The three main religions he used were Christianity, Eastern Religions and Islam. In 1960, Eastern and Islamic religions had high total fertility rates in relation to low income, while Christianity was more