1. Notes for CultureGrams & World Conflicts Today Users
2. Did You Know?
3. Holiday Focus/Upcoming World Holidays
4. Teaching Idea
5. Quiz
6. Featured Photo < NEW!
7. In the News
8. Email Service Information & Newsletter Forwarding

[ TOP ]

• Norway is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world.
  
  
• With the exception of the Nobel Peace Prize, Sweden awards the Nobel prizes each year.
  
  
• In Finland, spending time in the sauna is a national pastime.
  
  
• There are more than six hundred museums in the Netherlands.
  
  
• All Icelanders are properly and officially called by their first name even though they have a last name.

[ TOP ]

Some Upcoming World Holidays

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines – Carnival – First two weeks of July
The biggest cultural event of the year. Carnival includes the Miss Carnival Show (a beauty pageant), a children's parade of bands, other shows, and dances.

Mongolia – Naadam – July 11–13
Celebrates the Mongolian People's Revolution. It is celebrated with horse races, wrestling and other events.

Northern Ireland – Battle of the Boyne – July 12
A part of Orange Day festivities, which can last a full week and consist of parades, speeches, and other celebrations.

France – Bastille Day – July 14
Commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison during the French Revolution.

Peru – Independence Day – July 28
One of the country's most popular holidays. Schools usually take a one- or two-week break, and businesses may close for the celebrations that are held.

[ TOP ]

Principles and Standards for School Mathematics

Data Analysis and Probability Standard: Instructional programs from prekindergarten through grade 12 should enable all students to formulate questions that can be addressed with data and collect, organize, and display relevant data to answer them.

• [Grades 6–8] All students should formulate questions, design studies, and collect data about a characteristic shared by two populations or different characteristics within one population.
• [Grades 6–8] All students should select, create, and use appropriate graphical representations of data, including histograms, box plots, and scatterplots.

• CultureGrams Online Edition: Data Tables

1. Discuss which statistics are used to measure a nation's demographics and economy and why. See the Concepts and Terminology page for information on some common statistics.
   
   You might talk about infant mortality, literacy, and life expectancy rates along with Real GDP per capita. Explain the types of deductions that can be made from these statistics; for example, high infant mortality rates indicate that a country's pregnant women receive poor health care. Also mention that statistics can be misleading. For instance, some oil-rich nations have high Real GDPs per capita, but most of their population is poor due to grossly unequal wealth distribution. For the most part, however, these types of statistics provide a valuable way of comparing countries.
   
   
2. Choose a pair of statistics to focus on (for example, literacy and life expectancy). Have the students use the sortable data tables to look up these statistics for five countries in some of the world's major regions (Europe, Africa, North America, Caribbean, South America, Asia, Oceania, etc.)
   
   
3. Then, have students create averages from the statistics found in the five CultureGrams data tables for each region. From these averages, assign students to draw three histograms. The first should be a comparison of, for example, regional literacy rates; the second, regional life expectancy; and the third, a combination of both statistical averages.
   
   
4. Have the students compare and contrast the first two histograms they made. Do they share a similar pattern? Discuss the third histogram. Does there seem to by any correlation between the two statistics they analyzed? If so, what might be the cause of such a relationship? Might it be mostly coincidental, and if so, what other factors might affect literacy, life expectation, or the statistics you chose?
   
   
5. Additional Discussion Questions
   
   -- How can different graphical representations of statistics influence people's perception of data? Which type of representation would most emphasize the differences between the regional averages found? Which one would minimize that difference? (You can discuss histograms, scatterplots, graphs, pie charts, etc.)
   
   -- Discuss regional trends noted in the activity. What types of factors might cause them? Talk about whether they are geographic, historic, political, etc.
   
   
6. Extension Activity
   
   For a more in-depth comparison, have the students create a scatterplot of all the country statistics, identify and eliminate countries that are extreme outliers, and recalculate the regional averages. They would turn in these averages with an explanation of how much the outliers affected the overall statistical picture.

[ TOP ]

1. Which Scandinavian country speaks a language that is unrelated to any other Scandinavian languages but instead is related to Estonian?
   
   
2. The Hague, home to the International Court of Justice, is the government seat of what country?
   
   
3. Which Scandinavian country publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world?
   
   
4. What nation was invaded by Germany in both world wars despite its neutral status?
   
   
5. Which two of the five Scandinavian countries are not members of the European Union?

[ TOP ]

[ TOP ]

[ TOP ]