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Who wants to be a billionaire?

Where do billionaires live?

This lesson considers what a billion pounds/dollars represents, which billionaires have we heard of and what the global geography of billionaire wealth looks like.

Key questions:

  • What does a billion pounds buy?
  • Who are the celebrity billionaires?
  • Where do most billionaires live?
  • What do global patterns of billionaire wealth look like?

Key Concepts:

Space

Scale

 

What does a billion pounds buy?
It would pay for the construction of the new Wembley Stadium and three London Eyes – with 10 million pounds change!

Who are celebrity billionaires?
J K Rowling and Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and Richard Branson are just a few.  

 

Where do most billionaires live?
Most billionaires live in the USA, roughly half of the world total. Around a quarter live in Europe, followed by Asia and then the rest of the world. The numbers in Asia are growing rapidly but there are still only a handful of billionaires in Africa.  

What do global patterns of billionaire wealth look like? 
The number of billionaires in a region is not proportional to the size of the population of the region.

Click on an activity:
Starter
Main activity
Plenary

Interactives:

Celebrity billionaire 'Guess Who'

What does a billion pounds buy? 

Where do most billionaires live?

Downloads:

Word version of 'Where do most billionaires live?' interactive
The top 100 billionaires
All billionaires by region

Links:

Worldmapper: Wealth map
http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/
(Select WEALTH from the A-Z index; there is no billionaire map at the time of writing, but several wealth maps are provided)

Forbes Billionaire List (select lists, then billionaire)
www.forbes.com

 


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