Question: How old can an average person live up too?

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 13 Nov 2014:

It depends a lot on what country they live in. People in richer countries can afford to eat good food, they have easy access to medicines when they get sick, and there are very few threats like war, plagues, famine, drought and so on. So people who live in a fairly well-off country like Ireland or anywhere in Europe can expect to live pretty well into their 70’s or 80’s, with a few people living to be 100 or more!

If you live in a poor country, you may have no clean drinking water, there might be outbreaks of cholera or typhoid or another disease, and there might not be enough medicine to keep everyone healthy. There might be wars and famines too, so if you don’t get shot you might just starve to death. The average person in a country like that would be pretty lucky to live as long as 60 years.

Here’s a handy diagram of how old you can expect to live depending on where you’re living in the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#mediaviewer/File:Esperanza_de_vida.PNG

The green and blue colours mean higher life expectancy while brown, yellow and red mean lower. You can see that in rich places like America, Canada, most of Europe and Australia, people who live there can live for longer, while people from less well off countries like those that make up a lot of Africa don’t live as long. 🙁