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Kent F. Kruhoeffer
Joined: 22 Jan 2003
Posts: 2129
Location: 中国
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 Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2003 6:54 am Post subject: Food (or No Food?) For Thought |
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Hello Forum 
Since most of us teach English abroad, I thought some of you might be interested in the repost below. It's not exactly "on-topic" for EFL teachers per se, but it does put things into perspective a little, and contains statistics related to education and literacy ... 2 topics which should concern us as English teachers.
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*If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following:
There would be:
57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 Africans
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be non-white
30 would be white
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
1 would own a computer
When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.
The following is also something to ponder...
If you woke up this morning with more health than illness...you are
more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.
If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness
of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation...you
are ahead of 500 million people in the world.
If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death...you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.
If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep... you are richer than 75% of this world.
If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish somewhere ... you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.
If your parents are still alive and still married ... you are very lucky.
If you can read this message, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.
Someone once said:
What goes around comes around.
Work like you don't need the money.
Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like nobody's watching.
Sing like nobody's listening.
Live like it's Heaven on Earth.
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Footnote: *The statistics and commentary above were reproduced unedited and with permission from the original author. |
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Roger
Joined: 19 Jan 2003
Posts: 9138
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2003 10:38 am Post subject: |
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This makes me realise how pampered and protected I am, working and living in the world's most populous country!
Thanks for those stats! |
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Selyer
Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Posts: 62
Location: Poland
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2003 10:31 pm Post subject: It's a small world after all... |
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Thanks, as usual, for the interesting post Kent! (I generally enjoy your posts on the Russia forum.) Reminds me of the old "If we paid teachers babysitting wages..." anecdote. 
Selyer |
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MartinK
Joined: 01 Mar 2003
Posts: 344
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| Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2003 4:43 am Post subject: |
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...
Last edited by MartinK on Mon Nov 17, 2003 9:34 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Kent F. Kruhoeffer
Joined: 22 Jan 2003
Posts: 2129
Location: 中国
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| Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2003 7:31 am Post subject: thanks |
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Dear Roger, Selyer and MartinK
Thanks for dropping by to say hello. I'm glad at least a few people found this post to be worthwhile and interesting.
As for Karaoke boxes, I agree with MartinK wholeheartedly. The inventor of these things is surely the anti-christ, or his brother. 
Selyer: Love your dancing dog.  Now if I were as smart as I pretend to be, I'd figure out how to do that too ... maybe with a spinning bust of Vladimir Putin?
Take care,
keNt |
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scot47
Joined: 10 Jan 2003
Posts: 15343
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| Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2003 8:01 am Post subject: avatar for Kent K |
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| For Kent K, I suggest a portrait of that great Russian Tsar, Peter the Great. Or The Tsar Liberator, assassinated by the Narodniks. |
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Kent F. Kruhoeffer
Joined: 22 Jan 2003
Posts: 2129
Location: 中国
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| Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2003 8:35 am Post subject: decisions decisions! |
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Howdy Scot47
I'll take the one that wasn't assassinated please. |
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Paul G
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Posts: 125
Location: China & USA
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| Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2003 2:06 pm Post subject: |
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Kent:
I see you have learned how to use the emoticons and are having fun with them. Once that thrill wears off, you can scroll down the subject list on this forum and there are, as I recall, two threads about avatars (the dancing dog thingy). There are not only instructions for enabling an avatar, but links to sites where you can find avatars. |
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Buck Turgidson
Joined: 29 Jan 2003
Posts: 96
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| Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2003 4:00 pm Post subject: |
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Great post Kent! I thank God every day that I have the advantages I have.
As for avatars, how about Pushkin or maybe Bulgakov? |
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khmerhit
Joined: 31 May 2003
Posts: 1874
Location: Reverse Culture Shock Unit
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| Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 6:52 am Post subject: |
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| IT'S A SMALL WORLD.SHEEESH. |
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Gordon
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 5309
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 7:43 am Post subject: |
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| Great post Kent. I think all of yours are. It does make us stop and think how blessed we are and where we were born. |
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rj
Joined: 29 Mar 2004
Posts: 159
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| Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 9:07 am Post subject: |
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I always thought that was an interesting little tidbit till I discovered snopes
| Quote: |
Claim: If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, that village would resemble one described in this piece.
Status: Not quite.
Origins: This
thing has been circulating for ages (in Internet time) now, and people seem to find the contrasts it highlights between the "haves" and "have-nots" of the world compelling. However, much of the information it presents is questionable, out of date, or poorly-defined:
57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 Africans
According to the United Nations World Population Prospects document, the world population in the year 2000 was about 6.1 billion, with this geographic distribution:
Africa: 794,000,000
Asia: 3,672,000,000
Latin America and Caribbean: 519,000,000
Europe: 727,000,000
North America: 314,000,000
Oceania: 51,000,000
If we calculate the corresponding percentages (and lump North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Oceania into the "western hemisphere" category), we get the following ratios for our population of 100:
Asians: 60
Europeans: 12
Western Hemisphereans: 15
(9 Latin Americans/Caribbeans, 5 North Americans, 1 Oceanian)
Africans: 13
52 would be female
48 would be male
According to that same United Nations document, the world population in the year 2000 consisted of 3,051,099,000 men and 3,005,616,000 women, which (with a little rounding) breaks down to 50 men and 50 women in a population of 100.
70 would be non-white
30 would be white
Here we run into definitional problems trying to lump entire continents' worth of people into one class based on some nebulous concept of color. What makes a person "white" or "black"? If we say that Africans are considered "black," does that categorization apply equally to Nigerians, Egyptians, and South Africans? (Is the Middle East part of Africa or Asia?) Should the classification of Asians as "white" or "non-white" be based solely upon skin tone, or upon geographical and cultural factors as well?
The numbers given here seem to be based upon the classification of Europeans and Western Hemisphereans as "white" and Africans and Asians as "non-white" (and the assumption that those continents are homogeneous in racial composition). With those qualfications, a population of 100 (based on year 2000 numbers) would include 27 whites and 73 non-whites.
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
According to the chart at Adherents.com, which provides estimates of "the number of people who have at least a minimal level of self-identification as adherents" of a particular religion, the world's population in early 2001 was 33% Christian. So, our reduced population of 100 would be composed of 33 Christians and 67 non-Christians.
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
This one is almost impossible to estimate with any reasonable degree of accuracy. The classification of people as being either "heterosexual" or "homosexual" is too dependent upon subjective criteria, and the answers of respondents to surveys about their sexual habits are too easily influenced by other social factors. The common figure of "10% of the population is homosexual" is often bandied about, but that number is derived from a misapplication of a Kinsey study which was not based upon a representative sample of the population. One can find estimates that place of the percentage of the population considered to be homosexual anywhere between 1-2% and 25%-35%, but a reasonable survey of the more controlled studies would put the figure in about the 2-3% range (for males, at least).
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth, and all 6 would be from the United States.
This claim demontrates the precariousness of trying to summarize a very large, diverse population in a few simple statistics. For starters, our miniature world of 100 people only includes 5 people from all of North America, so any statement involving 6 people from the United States just doesn't compute!
"Wealth" is a concept difficult to measure with any precision, but we can use Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a reasonable approximation. If we take some figures from the CIA's World Factbook 2000, we find that the estimated GDP of the United States in 1999 was $9.255 trillion, out of a world total of $40.7 trillion. In other words, in 1999 the United States possessed about 23% of the world's wealth. If we assume that all 5 North Americans in our miniature world are from the United States, and that they have inherited an amount of wealth proportional to that held by the United States in the "real" world, together they'd still have only 23% of the world's wealth, not 59%. Even if you could find some combination of 6 people in our putative population of 100 who held 59% of the total wealth, they wouldn't all be from the United States.
80 would live in substandard housing
This statement can't be assessed without knowing the definition of "substandard" being employed here. "Substandard" by whose standards? And if a full 80% of the world's population truly lives in "substandard" housing, doesn't that indicate whatever standard is being used must be too high?
Estimates for this figure are all over the map as well (some United Nations housing statistics are informative but don't really answer the question), but a 1999 article in International Wildlife puts the estimate at 33%, not the 80% figure offered here.
70 would be unable to read
A 1998 UNICEF study put the world illiteracy rate at 16%, well short of the 70% claimed here.
50 would suffer from malnutrition
The World Health Organization puts the malnutrition figure at about 33%.
1 would be near death
1 would be near birth
This statement is simply too vague to evaluate. At any given time, one person in a hundred is near death? Just how "near"? Is age a factor in this statistic?
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
Again, we have to know whether our miniature world's inhabitants represent current population trends in age as well as other factors. According to the United Nations World Population Prospects document, the median age of the world's population was 26.5 in 2000, with that figure being lower in less developed (and more populous) areas of the world. (The median age of Africans, for example, was only 18.4 in 2000.) So, this statistic could be true simply because much of our miniature population would be too young to have finished college yet (assuming that "having a college education" means "graduated with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree"). However, if we assume everyone in our miniature world is of sufficient age and apply the current graduation rates of the USA (33%) to its share of the population (5), we'd have almost two college graduates from America alone. And other parts of the world (e.g., New Zealand, Netherlands, Britain, and Norway) have graduation rates equal to or higher than the USA's.
1 would own a computer
Computer ownership rates in the USA now indicate that over 50% of American households have computers, so if we assume that "households" can be equated with "people" in our miniature world, our 5 Americans alone would have at least two computers between them.
On the other hand, if this is the kind of material having a computer gives one access to, the inhabitants of our miniature world just might opt to do without them.
Last updated: 27 March 2001
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Stephen Jones
Joined: 21 Feb 2003
Posts: 4124
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| Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 1:26 pm Post subject: |
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The figures are almost all completely wrrong.
And what is the purpose of ressurecting all these zomibe posts? Has somebody posted someting they regret and is now trying to send it way down the list? |
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khmerhit
Joined: 31 May 2003
Posts: 1874
Location: Reverse Culture Shock Unit
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| Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 11:16 pm Post subject: |
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| "Regrets, I've had a few...." |
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fat_chris
Joined: 10 Sep 2003
Posts: 3198
Location: Beijing
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| Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2004 3:56 am Post subject: |
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k.hit has been resurrecting posts lately.
You see nothing is original anymore. Everything has become cyclical (or is it cynical?). Something that was created is re-created in a different form when the masses forget about the older prototypes.
At least that's how Hollywood works. (i.e. this crappy new Pierce Brosnan lawyer love movie that resembles last year's crappy George Clooney/Catherine Zeta-Jones lawyer love movie. No one wanted to see the Clooney movie. Why do the *beeps* in Hollywood think they would want to see the same thing with Brosnan?)
*SIGH* I hate Hollywood.
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