Answer to Map #1
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Answer: This map is a choropleth that shows the countries of the world in terms of their population density. On this map, the darker shades of blue refer to countries with higher population densities.
One of this week’s hints asked you to look specifically at Bangladesh, a small country home to a huge population of about 156 million people. Bangladesh has a population density of 2,896 people per square kilometer. The countries with the densest populations of all are Monaco (49,236 people per square kilometer) and Singapore (19,935 people per square kilometer) are quite small, so they do not stick out on this map. On this map, the darkest shade of blue denotes countries with more than 1,000 people per square mile. The lightest shade of blue denotes countries with fewer than 25 people per square mile: Bolivia, Chad, Russia, Central African Republic, Gabon, Kazakhstan, Guyana, Canada, Libya, Botswana, Mauritania, Suriname, Iceland, Australia, Namibia, and Mongolia. The most sparsely populated country in the world is Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark, at a remarkable 0.08 people per square mile. We could also flip that fraction around and say that, on average, a person living in Greenland has 12.5 square miles of land all to him or herself!
The data for this map is taken from Wikipedia’s “List of countries and territories by population density,” which in turn has citations for each country’s area and population.
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