Consider the following information:
A Geographic Information System or GIS is a computer system that allows you to map, model, query, and analyze large quantities of data within a single database according to their location. GIS gives you the power to: • create maps • integrate information • visualize scenarios • present powerful ideas, and • develop effective solutions GIS is a tool used by individuals and organizations, schools, governments, and businesses seeking innovative ways to solve their problems. GIS stores information about the world as a collection of layers that can be linked together by a common locational component such as latitude and longitude, a postal zip code, census tract name, or road name. These geographic references allow you to locate features on the earth’s surface for analysis of patterns and trends. Dozens of map layers can be arrayed to display information about transportation networks, hydrography, population characteristics, economic activity, and political jurisdictions.”
—Environmental Protection Agency, Mid-Atlantic Region

Read the following quotation:
“A State is an aggregation of free human beings, bound together by common ties, some of which may be called natural, some artificial. The chief natural ties are community of [ethnicity], of language, of religion, of sentiment or historical association, and lastly of land, i.e., of the territory which the State occupies. The most important artificial ties are law, custom, executive government; these are common bonds which the people have gradually developed for themselves and are not, in the same degree as the natural ties, original factors in their cohesion. There are also other ties which do not exactly fall under either of these divisions, such as the common interests of commerce and of self-defense. Now it is obvious that a State, in order to deserve the name, need not be held together by all these ties at once. Very few, if any, States have realized them all. But every State must have what we call the artificial ties, in some tolerably obvious form; that is, every State must have at least some laws which bind the whole community, and a common government to enforce obedience to those laws. Without these the word State cannot be applied to it, but only some such vague expression as ‘nation,’ . . . or ‘people,’ words which in our language do not usually connote governmental cohesion. . . . Nor can any community be called a State which is not wholly independent of every other community.”
—William Warde Fowler, The City-State of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (1913)

To maintain a population at its current level, the population’s TFR must be 2.1. A mother and father must each be replaced, and a certain number of additional births must occur to make up the shortfalls due to infant mortality and other casualties. The first chart shows changes in growth rate to a certain population from 1985 to 2025. The second chart shows the world’s total fertility rate.