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| Cape to Rio this weekend |
I spoke in a previous post about who South Africans are in terms of history and culture. I thought in this post I would share some statistics. I love Nationmaster for stats. They have all sorts of data, like who drinks the most beer or who lives the longest. So here are a few stats you might find interesting.
1. South Africa is the 25th most populated country out of a list of 241 countries. We have around 50 million people. Bottom of the list are the Pitcairn Islands with a whole 48 folk and top of the list is China with a lot of people. Germany comes in at number 16 and Canada is in 38th position.
2. We are 98th on the list for our ability to reproduce with 2.43 children per woman. Compare that to Mali where the average woman has 7.34 children in her lifetime and the Netherlands where she will have 1.98 children.
3. Only 2.33% of our population are immigrants versus 12.31% in Germany and 100% in the Vatican City.
4. France is the most visited country in the world with 67 310 000 arrivals recorded in the Nationmaster stats. Rwanda is the last place people want to visit with only 1000 visitors in the same time period and is at 152nd place. South Africa comes in at 22nd place with 5 557 000 visitors. Compare that to Thailand with 7 356 000 tourists and India with 2 374 000 arrivals in the same period. Monaco got 259 000 and Seychelles had 130 000 visitors. I suspect Soccer Cup will bump SA up a little when the next lot of number crunching happens.
5. We are not the world’s best drivers but we’re certainly not the worst. Statistics are measured in numbers pro rata per million people. The top four countries where you are most likely to die in a car accident are Belize, El Salvador, South Korea and Kuwait. South Africa clocks in at position 24 after the USA and Mexico. The UK, Hungary and Peru are the safest places to drive or be a pedestrian. Worth remembering next time a taxi swerves in front of you and you get the mutters.
