Briefly discuss the major global population clusters

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer: There are four major global population clusters. Of these, three are found in Asia. The three Asian clusters are East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia. The fourth cluster is Western Europe.
East Asia alone has a fifth of the world's population. This concentration includes the world's most populous country, the People's Republic of China. China's population is clustered near the Pacific Coast and in several fertile river valleys that extend inland, such as the Huang and the Yangtze, leaving much of the interior mountains and deserts sparsely inhabited. Japan and South Korea, also part of this cluster are not distributed uniformly either. Close to half of the people in these countries live in and around the three metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Osaka and Seoul.
South Asia, which includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka has a fifth of the world's people. The largest concentration of people in this cluster lives along a 900 mile (1500-kilometer) corridor from Lahore in Pakistan, through India and Bangladesh to the Bay of Bengal. Much of this area's population is concentrated along the plains of the Indus and Ganges rivers as well as near India's two long coastlines—the Arabian Sea to the west and the Bay of Bengal to the east.

Southeast Asia is the third important Asian cluster, with about five hundred million people, mostly on a series of islands that lie between the Indian and Pacific oceans. The islands include Java, Sumatra, Borneo, New Guinea, and the archipelago of the Philippines. With more than a 100 million inhabitants, Java, in Indonesia, has the highest concentration of people. Indonesia, consisting of 13,677 islands, is the world's fourth most populous country. The Philippines, with its string of islands also contain high population concentrations.

Western Europe, the smallest of the four major clusters in terms of population, contains one-ninth of the world's people. The region includes four dozen countries. The highest population concentrations in Europe are near the coalfields of the United Kingdom, Germany, and Belgium, historically the major source of energy for industry.