Understanding the World

If the World Were a Village is a book that helps children understand the world. With billions of people living on the planet, children, as well as adults, can easily become confused by the numbers.
This book decides to shrink the numbers to 100 people. If there were 100 people living in a world village how old would they be? What religions would they practice? How many of them would be starving, have television, schooling, clean water to drink?
Each two page spread approximates the make up of the village. Language was an interesting topic for me. In the world village 22 people would speak a Chinese dialect, 9 speak English, 8 speak Hindi, 7 speak Spanish, 4 speak Arabic, 4 speak Bengali, 3 speak Portuguese and 3 speak Russian. This page alone can lead to many fascinating questions. It gives an opportunity to explain where else in the world Portuguese is spoken and how it came to parts of South America. Why wouldn't anybody in the village speak Italian?
Especially for children who are starting to notice the newspaper on the breakfast table, this book can aid them in understanding world disasters and health issues, religious conflicts and many other topics that seem baffling when the zeros prove to many on the end of a statistic.
ages: 6-11