Thursday 9-20: why does the population move?

For today's second look at Population, we will take a brief look at how (and why) population -- meaning people -- moves from place to place. We'll start with a simple exercise: migration patterns inside the United States.

Here's what to do:

A) goto this website
http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/migration.html

It contains an interactive migration map for The United States. Each state is broken up into counties. You can either click on one of the counties, or enter in the name of a city or county in the textbox

B) Either way, when you select a county, it will give you red and blue lines.

C) The red lines represent people leaving that place you selected; the blue lines stand for people coming into the place you chose
D) You also get a bar graph telling you how many people moved in or out in a given year

Now, what you need to do with that map -->  pick at least 20 different counties, being careful to distribute them among many different states and various regions of the country -- east coast, west coast, south, midwest, etc etc

Try to identify trends...where are people moving to? Where are they leaving from? Can you identify some possible reasons why this might be happening?

Please create (and upload to Box.com) a file named after yourself plus the phrase "American migrations". Include all your findings

cheers,
Mr. L



S