Population Pyramid Worksheet Generator

Draws the age–sex pyramid of an invented country — seventeen five-year bands, men on the left and women on the right — or two countries of different shapes side by side on one shared percentage axis. A table gives every band's count in thousands, and the sheet asks for the total, the share under 15 and over 65, the dependency ratio, the largest band, the old-age sex ratio and the shape. The answer page works each figure from the table, so a pupil who reads the data exactly reaches the same number.

Sheet

Shape

Seed (optional)

Same seed and settings, same countries, while the generator is unchanged.

Paper size

Print size

Margin

Millimetres of blank edge, 5 to 40.

Turn the paper sideways

How to print this, or save it as a PDF

There is no PDF to download, and there does not need to be. Open the print command in your browser and choose “Save as PDF” as the destination. Your browser decides whether the page address and date print across the top and bottom; if they appear, turn off “Headers and footers” in the print dialog.
Set the scale to 100%, not “fit to page”. This sheet is already the exact size of the paper you chose, so anything that resizes it makes every measurement on it wrong.
Leave the paper size in the dialog set to the same one you chose here.

Your pyramids will appear here.

What this generator does

Gives pyramid-reading practice with data nobody can look up and answers that are exact for the printed numbers, and keeps comparisons honest by drawing both countries on the same percentage axis.

How to use this tool

Choose one country or a comparison of two.
Choose a shape — expanding, stable or contracting — or leave it on Any.
Press Make pyramids, open the answers to check them, and print: charts, tables and questions on page one, worked answers on page two.

Understanding the controls

Sheet: One country, or two of different shapes on the same axis with a comparison question.
Shape: Expanding, stable, contracting, or any; in a comparison it fixes the first country's shape.
Paper and seed: Paper size and density for printing; a seed rebuilds the same countries while the generator is unchanged.

Worked examples

Seed 'census', compare two: Arveland (contracting): 10.4% under 15, 29.4% aged 65+, dependency ratio 66.2. Calimar (expanding): 39.8% under 15, 2.7% aged 65+, dependency ratio 73.9 — higher, and almost all of it children. Both drawn on one axis of 0–8%.

Common use cases

Geography lessons on population structure
Practising percentages and ratios with real-looking data
Comparing a young and an ageing population without picking on a real country

How this generator works

Each band's size comes from a stated toy model: a birth trend (above 1 for a wide base, about 1 for straight sides, below 1 for a narrow base) times a survival curve that falls steeply in old age, slightly later for women, with a few per cent of noise. A pyramid is kept only if a separate check of its own numbers — the youngest three bands against ages 30–44 — gives the shape it is labelled with. Key figures are computed from the printed whole-thousand counts.

Randomness and fairness

Model settings, noise and country names are drawn with the browser's cryptographically secure generator, or from one seeded draw when a seed is typed. Answers are computed from the drawn counts. Seeded sheets are deterministic, not cryptographic.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

The countries and numbers are invented from a simple model. They look like pyramids but do not describe any real place, and the shapes are not forecasts.
The 80+ band is open-ended and covers more years than the others, so in an ageing country it can be the largest band; that is worth pointing out to pupils.
Percentages and ratios are rounded to one decimal place; there are no migration, war or baby-boom bulges.