Figure 2.

Distribution of lifespans in a life table (solid bars) and its associated living population (hollow bars), corresponding to the life tables summarized in Table 1. The living population’s lifespans are older than the life table’s due to the selection intrinsic to the prevalent cohort. The distributions are displayed to age 110 (the model life tables extend to age 130). Note that, in the upper left panel, the living population appears visually to have a younger distribution of ages of death than the life table; this is a consequence of the relative absence of very young deaths among the living population creating proportionately more deaths at middle ages. Note also that the visually small peaks in the lower right panel result from the extremely high infant mortality of the life table, which distorts the graph scale.