Reading and All That Jazz 5th Edition by Rita McCarthy ,Peter Mather

Exercise 2

For most of our history, humans have not been very numerous compared to other species. Studies of hunting and gathering societies suggest that the total world population was probably only a few million people before the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals around ten thousand years ago. The larger and more secure food supply made available by the agricultural revolution allowed the human population to grow, reaching perhaps 50 million people by 5000 B.
c. For thousands of years the number of humans increased very slowly. Archaeological evidence and historical descriptions suggest that only about 300 million people were living at the time of Christ. Until the Middle Ages, human populations were held in check by diseases, famines, and wars that made life short and uncertain for most people. Bubonic plagues periodically swept across Europe between 1348 and 1650. During the worst plague years (between 1348 and 1350), it is estimated that at least one-third of the European population perished. However, in 1650, at the end of the last great plague, there were about 600 million people in the world. Human population began to increase rapidly after A.D. 1600. It took all of human history to reach 1 billion people in 1804, but little more than 150 years to reach 3 billion in 1960. In 1999, only 39 years later, we passed 6 billion.
(p. 136)
Mode of Organization: _______________________________
Reasons: ________________________________________________________