AP Human Geography — population and migration

Unit 2 carries between twelve and seventeen percent of the multiple-choice score, and most of it comes down to a handful of models applied to countries a candidate has never heard of. That is how these ten questions are built. Every country in the bank is invented and described only by its characteristics, so a country cannot be placed by recognizing its name — a planner in a largely desert country wants to know the pressure on land that can actually grow food, and the question is which of arithmetic, physiological and agricultural density answers her, and what each of the others would measure instead. A country with falling deaths and still-high births has to be placed in the demographic transition by what its two rates are separately doing rather than by how fast it is growing. A country with a very wide base of children turns out to have a high dependency ratio for the opposite reason to the usual one.

The migration half begins with push and pull, which almost always operate together, and moves to the regularities Ravenstein set out: most moves are short, volumes fall off with distance, and every large stream generates a smaller counter-stream. The question about them turns on what kind of claim they are. A counter-flow does not refute a law of migration, because these are tendencies drawn from records rather than laws in the physical sense, and a war or a recruitment scheme can produce a long flow with no counter-stream at all without the account being damaged. The legal categories come next, stated as international law states them: a refugee has crossed an international border, an internally displaced person has not, and an asylum seeker is someone whose claim has yet to be decided — three statuses regularly used as though they were one word.

Three questions look at what populations do to states. The epidemiological transition shifts the leading causes of death from infectious to chronic conditions as public health improves. A pro-natalist policy commits a government to spending now against a workforce that arrives about twenty years later, which is the real trade-off rather than any question of whether such policies work. And the third takes a country well past the transition — low fertility, long lives, a shrinking workforce — and asks what follows for its pensions, its labor market and its likely reliance on migration.

The subject is handled with some deliberate care. No real country, region, ethnic group or religion is the subject of any claim about migration or fertility; no group of people is described as a burden or a problem; no stereotype is offered as a wrong answer; and no position is taken on any real border or immigration debate. Nothing is drawn from any College Board publication, released examination, course and exam description, scoring guideline or stimulus. There are no maps and no population pyramids — every structure is described in words, which means the diagram-reading that a real Unit 2 exam requires is not practiced here.

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Choose between arithmetic, physiological and agricultural density for a stated question, and say what each of the others measures
Place a described country in the demographic transition by what its birth and death rates are each doing
Read a described age structure for its dependency ratio, and say what a young base implies for public spending
State Malthus's argument and Boserup's counter-argument as two positions, and say which way the causation runs in each
Sort the factors in a described migration into push and pull, and see that most involve both
Recognize distance decay and counter-flows, and treat Ravenstein's regularities as tendencies rather than laws
Distinguish a refugee, an internally displaced person and an asylum seeker as international law distinguishes them
Describe the epidemiological transition as a shift in the leading causes of death
Name the real trade-off in a pro-natalist policy, which is the delay between the spending and the workforce
Work out what an aging population implies for pensions, the labor force and the demand for migration

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the published AP Human Geography course framework (Unit 2: Population and Migration Patterns and Processes).

Sample question

In the invented country of Fertilia, death rates have fallen sharply as sanitation and medicine have spread, while birth rates remain at their earlier high level and the population is growing fast. Which stage of the demographic transition model does this describe?

The first stage, in which births and deaths are both high and roughly in balance
The second stage, in which deaths have fallen while births remain high
The third stage, in which births have begun to fall in their turn and growth is slowing
The fourth stage, in which both rates are low and the population is roughly stable

See the answer

The second stage, in which deaths have fallen while births remain high

The second stage is defined by the gap between the two rates. Death rates fall quickly once clean water, sanitation and basic medicine arrive, while birth rates stay high because the expectations around family size change far more slowly, and that gap is what produces the fast growth described. In the first stage both rates are high and cancel out, so the population barely grows at all despite the high birth rate. In the third the birth rate has begun its own decline and growth is slowing. In the fourth both rates are low and the population is roughly stable. A country is placed by what the two rates are each doing, never by the size of its population or by its growth rate taken alone.

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