The United States - Population vs Area

It is the season of wild fires and forest fires in the state of Alaska.  The state chooses not to fight every fire because many break out in totally uninhabited area and it too hard to get in there.  In the process of looking up some information, I came a cross an article in the Alaska Business Insider with some great information.


The article takes time to explain why some of the maps show Alaska to be bigger or smaller than it is in relation to the continental United States.  According to this article, Alaska with its 663,300 acres is about 2.5 times as big as Texas, but the continental United States is actually 4.7 times as large as Alaska.

The article then goes on to compare the size of Alaska to Canada, Mexico, Greenland, and so many other countries.  They pointed out that India is almost twice the size of Alaska, while Russia is ten times the size of Alaska.  The article provides enough information for students to use in an infograph of relative sizes.

If you want to know how the area of Alaska compares with all other 49 states, this site has a ranking from 1 to 50 of all the states based on area. There is enough information to create a graphical representation as long as people realize that many states have under 1 percent of the area of the whole country.

If you rank the states based on population, Alaska is down toward the bottom but not at the bottom but if you choose to use population density instead, Alaska is the least dense state with one person per square mile.  This information comes from this site.

Looking at how Alaska compares by area, population, or density opens up the door to discussing which should be used under what circumstance.  It also opens up discussions on the best way to represent the information.  I've seen much of this information visually displayed using state maps and coloring the state based on ranges but is this really the best way to do it?

This could also open up the discussion of why might you use a bar graph or pie chart.  Often times, we tell students to display information using a specific format and type of graph but we never discuss why it should be done this way.  This type of information is great for discussions on why certain information is better displayed this way or that way.

I looked at Alaska because its summer right now because there are many fires the state refuses to fight because they are in areas where no one is living and no one is in danger of being hurt.  When you have a population density of one person per square mile, this puts it into a better context of explaining why the government chooses to do things this way.

It also explains why they might immediately put a wild fire out in California with a density of 255 per square mile. Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great weekend.