Practice question · True or false
A country whose fertility has been below replacement for four decades must by now have a shrinking population.
Hints
- Ask what else can add people to a population besides births.
- Momentum and migration both work against the arithmetic of the fertility rate.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. Spain is the counter-example in this lesson: below replacement since the early 1980s, and substantially larger today. Fertility describes the reproduction of a cohort; total change is the sum of four separate terms, and any of the other three can dominate for decades.
Practise Population: Structure and Dynamics
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Sociology I is free to start.
More questions on Population: Structure and Dynamics
- Complete the account of the basic demographic measures.
- Crude birth rates are sensitive to age structure, whereas the total fertility rate isolates cohort…
- Spain’s fertility has been below replacement since the early 1980s, and its population is nonetheless larger…
- Arrange the demographic transition in the order the changes actually occur.
- In a low-mortality country, what total fertility rate is taken as replacement level? Give the figure to one…
- Sort each feature by whether it characterises stage 2 of the demographic transition or stage 4.
- Estimate the percentage of Spain’s population aged 65 and over in recent years.
- Arrange these moments in the study and history of population, earliest first.
- Malthus’s prediction failed chiefly because food production grew far faster than he expected while fertility…