Beyond endless lists of numbers, statistics enable us, when the data is presented visually, to draw far-reaching conclusions. In the following video, Kim Preshoff presents population pyramids – a visual representation of the population data of a country. He shows population pyramids of various countries and how these pyramids allow us to learn about the countries' past and predict what the future may hold for them.
Enjoy watching!
Lecturer: Kim Preshoff, as part of TED-ED Talks. Translated by Yifat Adler from the Davidson Online team
Kim Preshoff illustrates population pyramids from a few countries. The following image depicts Israel’s 2010 population pyramid. Women are represented on the right, in purple, and men on the left, in blue. Population size is marked in thousands.
Israel’s population pyramid in 2010. Image: FargomeD, Wikipedia
The population growth in Israel is due to natural growth and immigration waves. In an essay (in Hebrew) titled “Population growth in Israel”, published on the website of the Center for Technological Education, you can read a comprehensive review of the characteristics of Israel’s population growth and the difference in population growth in different places on Earth. The essay was written in the 1990s and presents forecasts for 2020. Did the forecast come close?
We can see that statistics are very important for policy makers. In Peter Donnelly’s TED talk, “How stats fool juries”, you can see just how important statistics are for all of us.
Yifat Adler (Ben Yaakov)
Davidson Institute of Science Education
Weizmann Institute of Science