Middle School
Worksheets
Population Three Hundred Million
Suppose that you live in a country other than the United States. You have never been to the U.S. You want to learn about it. What do you do?
There are many ways to learn about a country. You can watch TV shows or read magazines from the U.S. You can look at U.S. maps. You can read stories written by people who live here. You can look at paintings of scenery. Each of these methods will give you a part of the picture, but none of them will give you a sense of what the whole country is like.
If you want to look at the big picture, it might be a good idea to look at statistics. While numbers can seem boring, they can give you plenty of information. You can use this information to draw some interesting conclusions of your own.
Let's take a look at U.S. population statistics. In the early years of our country - the late 1700s - there were about three million people in the United States. Three million is a big number, but it is tiny compared to the over three hundred million people in the United States now.
A look at the yearly population statistics gives us more information. It shows that the population grew slowly during the 1800s and began to increase more rapidly in the late 1800s. It rose rapidly during the 1900s, and is still continuing to rise rapidly. Look at a few sample years:
1800 - five million
1850 - twenty-three million
1900 - seventy-six million
