What is the average age of people in the world today?

looney_tunes

An exact answer is difficult for a number of reasons. First, as a mathematics teacher, I would wnat to know which average you mean - both median and mean would be appropriate measures of the centre of the data (if it were available). Second, the exact populations of many regions of the world are not known, let alone the exact age of inhabitants. This link offers a number of interesting statistics about world population. http://www.wholesomewords.org/missions/greatc.html#agestruct From the site: Age Structure of World's Population1 1.8 billion people under age 15 years (27%) 4.4 billion people age 15-64 years (65%) 518 million people are 65 years and over (8%) If I analyse the grouped data (which is too roughly grouped to be of real accuracy), I come up with approximately 34 as the mean age. But this requires several quite possibly invalid assumptions about the distribution of ages in each of the three groups. See also Question #57160, which gives a median age of 24.3 in 2000. However, if you read the fine print, that is for undeveloped countries only, with developed countries at 37.4. http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question57160.html http://www.overpopulation.com/discussion/fullthread$msgnum=1063 Feb 02 10, 2:43 AM

looney_tunes

This presentation (2008) has a number of graphs with relevant information. If you have the inclination to make measurements to assign numerical values to the distributions (especially graphs 3 & 4), you could make a more accurate and contemporary estimate of the mean or median age. http://www.scribd.com/doc/6502276/2008-World-Population-Presentation Feb 02 10, 2:48 AM