Arrange the following countries of the world having the highest density of population (Year 2012) in descending order.
(a) Bangladesh
(b) Singapore
(c) Malta
(d) Monacco
(e) Mauritius
(f) Baharain

Question

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Correct — option (3), the order (d), (b), (f), (c), (a), (e): Monacco, Singapore, Baharain, Malta, Bangladesh, Mauritius, printing the paper's spellings for Monaco and Bahrain. The ranking these six occupy is stable, and the current published figures give exactly the same sequence: Monaco at about 19,400 people per square kilometre on an area of roughly two square kilometres, Singapore at about 8,300 on 737, Bahrain at about 2,000 on 790, Malta at about 1,700 on 320, Bangladesh at about 1,300 on 130,170, and Mauritius at about 640 on just under 2,000. The single most important thing this question tests is the difference between total population and population density. Bangladesh has by far the largest population of the six — over 160 million against Monaco's few tens of thousands — and three of the four answer choices begin with Bangladesh, which is not an accident. Density is population divided by area, and it is the divisor that decides the ranking here: Monaco is a city-state of two square kilometres, so even a small population produces an extraordinary figure, while Bangladesh spreads a very large population over 130,000 square kilometres and lands in fifth place. The pattern the sequence reveals is that the top of any density table is occupied by micro-states and city-states rather than by populous countries. Monaco and Singapore are entire countries that are effectively single urban areas; Bahrain and Malta are small island states, Bahrain's density having risen steeply with migrant labour drawn to the Gulf; Bangladesh is the densest of the world's genuinely large countries, which is why it appears in this list at all; and Mauritius, an island of about two thousand square kilometres with rather over a million people, is dense by world standards and yet the lowest of these six. Ordering questions of this kind are also decidable without exact figures — group the six into micro-states, small islands and large countries, then order within each group.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This choice opens with Bangladesh and closes with Monaco, which is the ordering a candidate produces by ranking total population instead of density. It is the most complete inversion available in the option set: the country with the smallest area and the highest density is placed last, and the country with the largest area and the largest population is placed first. It also puts Mauritius above Malta, reversing a pair that is separated by a wide margin, since Malta's roughly 1,700 people per square kilometre is nearly three times Mauritius's 640. Any choice that begins with Bangladesh should be treated with suspicion on a density question, and here three of the four do.  (b) This choice again puts Bangladesh at the head, then arranges the rest into an order that is nearly right but not right: Monaco, Singapore, Malta, Bahrain, Mauritius. Even setting the opening error aside, it reverses Bahrain and Malta. That pair is the genuinely difficult one in this question, because both are small island or near-island states of comparable size and the gap between them is smaller than any other gap in the sequence. Bahrain sits above Malta at roughly 2,000 against roughly 1,700, its figure having climbed sharply with the migrant workforce that Gulf economies depend on, and that is the specific fact a candidate needs to separate the two.  (d) This is the third choice to begin with Bangladesh, and it then scatters the rest: Singapore, Monaco, Mauritius, Bahrain, Malta. It reverses the top pair by placing Singapore above Monaco, when Monaco's density is more than twice Singapore's, and it pushes Malta to the bottom, below Mauritius, when Malta is nearly three times as dense. The construction of this option set is worth noticing in itself: because three of the four choices open with the same country, the opening element carries almost no discriminating information, and a candidate must look at the second and third positions to make progress. On an ordering question always check where the choices actually differ before spending effort on where they agree.

Concept: Population density is the crudest of the measures of population distribution — arithmetic density, the total population divided by the total area — and its crudeness is what makes it both useful and misleading. It says nothing about how the population is distributed inside the territory, so a country that is mostly uninhabitable desert or mountain will show a low arithmetic density even where its habitable pockets are extremely crowded. Geographers therefore also use physiological density, population per unit of arable land, and agricultural density, farming population per unit of arable land, and the divergence between the three is often the interesting thing. Egypt is the standard illustration: a low arithmetic density across a territory that is almost entirely desert, and an enormous physiological density along the Nile. At the top of the world's arithmetic-density table sit territories that are effectively single cities — Macau, Monaco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Gibraltar — followed by small island states, and the highest-ranking large country is Bangladesh. India's own density at the 2011 census was 382 persons per square kilometre, with Bihar the densest state and Arunachal Pradesh the least dense.

State PCS 2021 Q20 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q20 — Geography PYQ with Answer