Question

How do you calculate population density?

Answer 1

Hint: Population of an area is the number of people living in a particular territory. Data on population is important for social sciences as it helps us to understand issues like resource allocation, welfare policies, governance etc.

Complete answer: Population density is a measure to understand spatial distribution of population. Population density is basically a way to calculate the number of people living per unit area.
Population density is therefore defined as the number of people living per square mile or per square kilometer.

Population density is usually calculated for a city, country or territory like a state or a province.
The formula for calculating population density is:
Population density = Population / Land area in square miles (or square kilometers)
For example, the world has a population of 7,500,000,000 people and an area of 510,000,000 square kilometer because of which the population density of the world is 14.7 per square kilometer. However if we calculate population density based on earth’s land area, which is around 150,000,000 square kilometer, earth’s population density would be around 50 people per square kilometer.

Population density is high in areas of favorable geographic and political factors like plain terrain, proximity to water resources, moderate climate, political stability, availability of jobs and other facilities. Large part of the world's population lives in urban areas because of which cities have high population density.
Bangladesh, Singapore, South Korea are some of the most densely populated countries of the world.

Note: One should note that 95% of the world's population lives in just 10% of the world's land area. Though arithmetic density is one of the most common ways to measure spatial distribution of population , other formulas and methods have been developed to measure density of population.
These include physiological density( total population by total area arable land), agricultural density (total rural population by total area of arable land), residential density (number of people living in urban area by total area of residential land) and ecological optimum which is basically a measure to determine the population that can be supported by natural resources.