New Unit

Today in class we started our new unit. At the start of every unit we write down 4 key issues that by the end of the unit we should know the answer to each question. So to start off class today we got our new questions and wrote them down on the first page of this unit. We then started with our first topic, population of the United States and of the world. We learned that every second the word population grows by about 2.5 people, and by the end of the class period the population would have increased by around 8,000 people. Right now the word population is a little over 7.5 billion people. We learned that it took the world 10,000+ years to get to its first billion, but recently its only taken the world 12 years to get to the most recent billion, 7. We also learned that over 90% of our world population growth is from undeveloped countries, like Africa. This information surprised me because you would think since America is developed and has the resources to properly care for children we would be having more kids than in countries like Africa where they have limited resources. After talking about population, we went into the topic of life expectancy. We learned that life expectancy is significantly higher for women than it is for men. We talked about why this might be and came up with a few ideas . We thought that although it is changing as the years pass, it is mostly men in dangerous and sometimes life threatening jobs. We also came up with the fact that women generally care for themselves more than men and go to the doctors more often. These were just a few examples of our brainstorming but we did find quite a few reasons that could be the cause of women having such a higher life expectancy. I was very interested by the information we learned today and I am excited for this unit to start.