The number of deaths per 1000 people per year

• A. Death rate
• B. Mortality rate
• C. Life expectancy
• D. Infant mortality rate

Answer: (A)

Measuring how many people die in a population each year uses a rate that relates deaths to the size of the population. The phrase “deaths per 1,000 people per year” is a direct description of that rate, which is the death rate. It shows, for a given year, how many deaths occur out of every 1,000 people, giving a sense of how deadly the population is overall.

Life expectancy, by contrast, is about the average number of years a person is expected to live, not how many die in a year. Infant mortality rate looks at deaths of infants under one year old per 1,000 live births, which uses a different denominator and focus. Mortality rate can be used synonymously with death rate in many contexts, but the wording here clearly matches the concept of the death rate as the number of deaths per population per year.