Life Expectancy PowerPoint

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Levels
Secondary school
Subjects
History, geography & social studies.

About this PowerPoint

Life expectancy is a very important measure when we compare the health of different countries. However, students often misunderstand some of the characteristics of life expectancy. This PowerPoint presentation focuses on two of these characteristics:

  1. Life expectancy is an average. Most people live either much longer or much shorter than what the life expectancy indicates.
  2. When life expectancy is low, this is mostly due to a very high child mortality rate. Those that survive the dangers of childhood can expect to live to a relatively old age, even in countries with very low life expectancy.

To illustrate these points we display the expected life spans of five newborns in the African country of Burundi and five newborns in Sweden.

Download the PowerPoint as well as the Teacher’s guide (Word) to get going!