AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Canada and the World Backgrounder articles from December 2004
A bimonthly magazine that provides background information on current events. Written specifically for high school students, as well as teachers and librarians. Individual issues are devoted to one political or social issue, which is considered both as an
Set up an RSS feed
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
Canada and the World Backgrounder archives from December 2004
Carrying capacity: "private sector economists expect real GDP growth in Canada to average 2.7 percent in 2004 ... [and] 3.3 percent in 2005." 2004 Federal Budget Document.(Population--Introduction)
December 1, 2004... Woo-hoo! High fives all round. A growing economy means more for everybody--more money with which to buy more stuff. More jobs for people making the increased amount of stuff richer people are buying. And that increases the demand for even more...
Six billion and counting: it took all of recorded history until 1804 for world population to reach one billion; it took another 123 years to reach two billion; by 1960, it hit three billion; 1975, four billion; 1986, five billion; and, in 1999, we crossed the six billion mark.(Population--Numbers)
December 1, 2004... In 1900, the world's population was growing at about 10 million people a year. At the beginning of the 21st century, it was growing at just under 80 million a year (it peaked in the late 1990s at 82 million). As one writer calculated, even if...
Doctor doom: more than 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus wrote an essay in which he put forward the theory that human population growth would outstrip food production, and that this would lead to wars and starvation that would reduce the population to a manageable size.(Population--Thomas Malthus)
December 1, 2004... Thomas Malthus came from a privileged background. His father, Daniel, was an English country gentleman with a comfortable bank account. Thomas went to Cambridge University and graduated in 1791 with a Masters degree in political economics. He...
Ten years later: the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development, which took place in Cairo, Egypt, was a watershed event for population control. Since then, some progress has been made, but a lot remains to be done.(Population--Cairo Consensus)
December 1, 2004... Cairo, the capital of Egypt, is a teeming city of 16 million people. It is beset by more than its fair share of problems; as Lonely Planet, the Web-based travel guide, puts it, Cairo "is an all-out assault on the senses. Chaotic, noisy,...
Putting the brakes on reproduction.(Population--China)
December 1, 2004... China's population, now officially at 1.3 billion, will continue to increase by about 10 million a year and reach a peak of 1.46 billion in the mid-2030s. This creates two problems for China: the expanding working-age population will put...
Living on the edge: as the world's population grows people are pushed into areas that are basically uninhabitable.(Population--Margins)
December 1, 2004... Why do we keep seeing mass starvations in places such as Ethiopia? The answer is that in Ethiopia, and many other areas, human existence hangs by a thread. In normal years, people can have enough to stay alive and no more; it's called...
Baby bust: one of the main reasons birth rates are down in Canada is the tendency of women to delay starting families until later in life, with the average age of a woman having her first child at about 29.(Population--Implosion)
December 1, 2004... Canada is running out of people. In common with 59 other countries, which together contain 44 percent of the world's population, Canada's population is declining. These 60 countries have fertility rates below 2.1 children per woman, the number...
Quote ... unquote.
December 1, 2004... 'The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars, and earthquakes have come to be regarded a blessing to overcrowded nations, since they serve to prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race." Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus 3rd cent AID...
The census.
December 1, 2004... The count started in 1665. That was the year Jean Talon arrived in North America. France's King Louis XIV sent the redoubtable M. Talon to put together a report on how well his colony was doing.
The Governor was in charge of the colony of...
Our people--the national mood.
December 1, 2004... Who are we? In September 2003, The Economist Stuck some funky sunglasses on a moose and called us "Cool."
The highly respected publication used some other nice descriptive phrases for us: "increasingly self-confident," "boldness in social...
Our families--traditional.
December 1, 2004... Most Canadians believe the traditional family is best. This is the family with a mother and father married to each other and their children. It is called a nuclear family because the nucleus is the "central part around which other parts are...
Our communities--definition.
December 1, 2004... There are geographically-defined communities, professional communities, communities of knowledge, corporate communities, and academic communities. The list goes on to include urban communities, rural communities, ethnic communities, grassroots...
Our country--the economy.
December 1, 2004... Canadians are feeling optimistic; as optimistic as they have ever felt. This comes out of a November 2004 study by the polling company Ipsos-Reid.
The poll was carried out for the Globe and Mail and CTV, and it found that 81 percent of us...