World Atlas: More People Smoking Cigarettes than Ever

There are more people smoking now than ever before, despite health warnings and the rising price of cigarettes. In 1980, 4,453 billion cigarettes went up in smoke, which increased to 6,319 billion in 2010. By 2020, you can expect to find nearly seven billion cigarette ends littering the world.

Top of the charts in terms of nicotine addiction are Asia and Australia, which is where 57 percent of cigarettes are smoked today.

These alarming statistics are among many of the intriguing facts laid bare in the ninth edition of Dan Smith's The State of the World Atlas.

Elsewhere, the book reports that 19 percent of Americans say they could not feed their families in 2011, despite living in one of the world's richest countries. Meanwhile, 20 percent of India's population remains undernourished, despite its Gross National Income rising by 450 percent since 1990.

An even more shocking revelation is that 2.5 billion people live on less than £1.25 a day, which represents one in three of the global population.

In terms of population, China is still the biggest, with 1,341 million people inhabiting its 9,596,960 sq km. Plenty are drafted into the military, with China holding the title for the world's largest army.

India has the second largest population, with 1,225 million, followed by the USA at 310 million. How and where we live has also changed considerably over the centuries. In 2012, 51 percent of the world's population lived in cities. In 1800, just 3 percent did.

According to estimates, more than seven billion people live on our planet. Each day, some 200,000 new babies are born, that's 140 new people per minute.

Over an entire year, about 80 million humans are born and experts predict that more than nine billion people will be living on Earth by 2050.

The number one religion is Christianity, with over 1.6 billion, while Islam isn't far behind at around 1.3 billion. There are 950 million Hindus in the world and nearly 500 million Buddhists.

For some scary stats and to prove we're all doomed, look no further than the fact that the amount of global debt grew by 140 percent between 2000-2011.

In terms of bloodshed, Asia racked up 50 wars between 1990 and 2010, while there were 37 in Africa and 15 in the Middle East.

The majority of UN peacekeepers hail from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, with South Asian countries providing a total of 33 percent.

There's an estimated £13 trillion of assets legally held in tax havens and £1.8 trillion in revenue that's lost to illegal tax evasion. This evidence seems to support the case for those who believe in the growing divide between rich and poor.

For some good news, 20 percent of the world's MPs are women. However, this is a mere 3 percent rise since 1945.