SAY WHAT?
Stuff you don’t need to know, and yet
DID you hear the one about Uncle Frans who had his fifth child baptised Zhou Ling? He was told that every fifth child born is Chinese.
Well, if the uncle's boy was born in 2023, he should have probably named him Sanjeev or Rajesh. There are now more people in India than in China.
A quarter of the 8-billion people on Earth live in the four large countries on the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka). In all these countries, cricket is the most popular sport.
South Africa is the sixth-largest country in Africa after Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Tanzania, and Egypt — that is, if you don't consider Egypt as part of the Middle East but as part of Africa.
According to the UN, only a few countries will be responsible for more than half of the world's population growth in the next 30 years. Five of them are in Africa: DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania. Polygamy is one of the reasons for this. Around 36% of married women in Nigeria share their husbands with other wives. The figures for Tanzania and Ethiopia are 25% and 11%, respectively.
These are the latest (rounded) population figures of countries with more people than South Africa (in millions): India 1,428; China 1,426; US 336; Indonesia 277; Pakistan 240; Nigeria 224; Brazil 216; Bangladesh 173; Russia 144; Mexico 128; Ethiopia 126; Japan 123; Philippines 117; Egypt 113; DRC 102; Vietnam 99; Iran 89; Türkiye 86; Germany 83; Thailand 72; Britain 68; Tanzania 67; France 65; and South Africa 60.
There are more than 7,100 recognised languages in the world. English is the most widely spoken language internationally — note that this does not refer to the number of native speakers — with 1,132 billion speakers. Mandarin follows with 1,117 billion, then Hindi (615), Spanish (534), French (280), Arabic (274), Bangla/Bengali (265), Russian (258), Portuguese (234), Indonesian (199), Urdu (170) and German (132).
– Max du Preez
♦ VWB ♦
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