Geography Teaching Today

Key questions:

• What is Quality of Life (QoL)?
• Does it vary with place?
• Who wants to be a billionaire – and why?

Key concepts:
Place

What is Quality of Life (QoL)?
The well-being or quality of life of a population is usually measured by many social and economic factors. Most of it relates to standard of living, the amount of money, health and access to goods and services that people have and these are quite easily measured. Other factors like happiness, environmental health and innovation are harder to measure.

The Human Development Index or HDI gives a quick way to compare countries’ development. It is also used to measure the impact of economic policies on quality of life. It combines data for income (GDP per capita PPP), life expectancy, adult literacy, and enrolment in education, to give each country a sore between 0 and 1. The higher the value, the higher the level of human development.

Does it vary with place?

Maps of HDI are a good way to see the spatial distribution of human development. They can be colour-coded or use proportional symbols. The latest Human Development Report can be found at http://hdr.undp.org/

Who wants to be a billionaire – and why? 
Students should be able to return to the original question and title of this module with a more informed answer.  They should be more informed after having explored seven key areas of economic geography / development studies, looked at where in the world important economic changes are taking place and the issues that arise from these changes, explained how the UK and other places are interdependent, and looked at the origin of the wealth of Asian and Middle Eastern billionaires. 

They should have a better understanding of whether money is the most important factor in quality of life. They should have thought about what is happening in different parts of the world today and what it means to both to them and to people in other countries and consider whether billionaires – who like them are “global citizens” (but often live and work in many different places) have special responsibilities and what these might be. They might have had opportunities to discuss fairness, democracy and the reasoning behind progressive / redistributive taxation, good causes that would benefit from the considerable gifts that billionaires are in a position to donate, and lastly, what makes people happy.

Click on an activity:
Starter
Main activity
Plenary

Quality of Life Sheet

HDI sheet