People and places
292
Vatican City isn’t actually a city. It is a country,
although it is only the size of 50 football pitches
and its official population is just 840 people.
Between 1800 and 2000, the population
of the world grew from 1 billion to
6 billion.In 27 ce Rome became the first city
to have 1 million inhabitants.In 2008, for the first time in history, more
than half the people of the world lived
in cities and towns rather than rural
communities.There are 50
states in the USA.
The most recent to
join was Hawaii,
on 20 August 1959.
Tokyo is the largest city
in the world. If you
include all its suburbs, its
population is 37 million.
English is an official language in
67
countries.
There are about 110,000
Inuit people, almost
equally distributed
between Alaska,
Canada, and Greenland.
About 7,000 different languages are used
around the world, of which half are
Francespoken by fewer than 10,000 people.is the world’s most
popular
holiday destination with more than
89 million
tourists each year.
It is
estimated that
3.6 billion people
watched the 2016
Rio de Janeiro
Olympics on
TV.
Nigeria is the most densely populated country
in Africa with more than 197 million people,
but Algeria is the largest country
geographically with a total area of
2,381,741 sq km (919,595 sq miles).Niger has the youngest population in the world.
More than half its inhabitants are aged 18 or under.Singapore is both a city
and a state. It is the only
member of the UN
with a completely
urban population.China and India both
have more than 1.3 billion
inhabitants. The next
biggest country by
population, the USA, has
fewer than 330 million.Istanbul in Turkey is the only city to
straddle two continents – Europe and Asia.Damascus in Syria is the world’s oldest city.
People have lived there for more than 10,000 years.Before humans arrived
in New Zealand around
1,000 years ago, there
were no mammals
there except bats.
Flightless birds,
such as the
kiwi, walked
the land
instead.
The city of Troy
was thought to be
mythical until its ruins
were found in Turkey in
the 1870s.The tallest building in
the world is the Burj Khalifa
in Dubai. It is 828 m (2,700 ft) high,
the tallest structure ever built by humans.There are 195 countries in the world.
There is enough stone in the
Great Pyramid in Egypt to
build a wall 1 m (3 ft) high
around France.The football World
Cup has only ever
been won by
countries from
Europe or South
America.With 4 billion
viewers, football
is the most- watched
sport in the world.
The flag of Nepal is the only national flag
that is not rectangular. It looks like
one triangle on top of another.Mongolia is the
most sparsely
populated
country in the
world. There are
only 1.9 people
per sq km
(4.7 per sq mile).
WalMart, a US company with a chain of stores,
is the largest company in the world with
2.3 million employees.The bricks
of the traditional
rondavel houses of
Rwanda are stuck
together using
cow
dung.
292_293_PeopleFacts.indd 292 03/01/19 12:11 PM