A survivorship curve simply represents the probability that an individual will live to a given age and is determined by plotting the percentage of survivors in a given population as a function of their age. Its converse is called a mortality curve and is the percentage of people who have died at a given age, representing the probability that an individual will die at that age. Biologists, actuaries, and gerontologists have coined the term mortality or death rate to denote the number of deaths in a population that occur in some given period of time (a month, say) relative to the number that are
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