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Major US Cities

Run the Major US Cities MicroSim Fullscreen

About This MicroSim

This map shows the 20 largest cities in the United States. Each city is a circle. The bigger the circle, the more people live there, and the color shows the region. The number inside each circle is the city's rank, from 1 (New York) to 20 (Washington, DC).

The list on the right ranks the cities and draws a bar for each one, so students can see at a glance how much larger New York is than every other city.

Click a city to open its fact card:

  • Population from the 2020 Census
  • Region of the country
  • A famous landmark
  • What the city is known for
  • A Did you know? fact that makes the city unique

Compare Two Cities puts two cards side by side and adds a sentence that compares their populations and regions.

How to Use

  1. Hover over a circle to see the city's name and population.
  2. Click a circle, or click a city name in the list, to read about the city.
  3. Click Compare Two Cities, then click two cities. Read the sentence under the cards to see how they compare.
  4. Click a third city to replace the first one and keep comparing.
  5. Use the + and - buttons to zoom in where cities are crowded together, such as Dallas and Fort Worth or San Francisco and San Jose. Drag the map to move it.
  6. Reset clears the cards and returns to the starting view.

Iframe Embed Code

You can add this MicroSim to any web page by adding this to your HTML:

<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/us-geography/sims/major-cities/main.html"
        height="676px"
        width="100%"
        scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Grade Level

Grades 3-6

Duration

10-15 minutes

Learning Objective

Students will locate major US cities and describe what makes each city unique (Bloom's level: Understand).

Prerequisites

  • Students can find the regions of the United States on a map.
  • Students know that population means the number of people who live in a place.

Activities

  1. Exploration (5 min): Students click the five largest cities and read each card. Ask: Which of the five are near an ocean or a Great Lake?
  2. Guided Practice (5 min): Students turn on Compare Two Cities and compare New York with Los Angeles, then Dallas with Fort Worth. Ask: Which pair is closer in size? Which pair is closer together on the map?
  3. Assessment (5 min): Each student picks one city and describes it to a partner without saying its name: its region, its size, and what it is known for. The partner finds the city on the map.

Discussion Questions

  • Which state has the most cities on this map? Which regions have the fewest?
  • Why do you think so many large cities are near water?
  • Five of these cities are state capitals and one is the national capital. Can you find them?
  • The largest city in a state is often not its capital. Which cities on this map show that?

Assessment

  • Student locates a named city on the map.
  • Student describes one thing that makes a chosen city unique.
  • Student uses the comparison sentence to tell which of two cities has more people.

Data Notes

  • Populations are the official counts from the 2020 United States Census (April 1, 2020) for each city itself, not the surrounding metro area.
  • City rankings change over time. Newer Census Bureau estimates place some fast-growing cities, such as Fort Worth and Jacksonville, higher on the list.
  • City locations and state shapes come from Natural Earth public domain map data.
  • The spec for this MicroSim asked for photos of landmarks. No photos are included. Each card names a famous landmark instead.

References

  1. City and Town Population Totals - U.S. Census Bureau. Includes the April 1, 2020 census count for every city.
  2. List of United States cities by population - Wikipedia table of Census Bureau counts, used to cross-check the 2020 figures.
  3. Natural Earth - Public domain map data used for the city locations and state shapes.
  4. Leaflet - The open-source JavaScript library used to draw the map.