"La mitad de la población tiene menos de quince años."

In Spanish, you can't say "Mitad de la población...", in the same way you can't say "Niños corren" (for "Boys run"). Whereas in English it is possible to remove the article, in Spanish it's not.

Hola ryan.fleming: When you are speaking of the grand aspect of a subject (like "half of the population" or "world peace" or "college students" or "animals"), the article is used in Spanish, but not translated in English. More examples, "Men like football more than women" (note: In English, no articles), but in Spanish: "A los hombres les gustan el fútbol más que las mujeres".(note: in Spanish, the articles "los" and "las"). "Flies are insects" = "Las moscas son insectos".

Population is singular, so you say "the population is".

If the group is doing something collectively, you treat is as singular. If the group has a bunch of members each doing individual things, you treat it as plural. That's basically what I was taught.

Hola itay_bi: There is some debate about this. Some say "are", some say "is". To me, "is" sounds better, but I am not going to worry about it. Not that important. I'm moving on to the next sentence. CHAU

Jan 30, 1014. It depends on where you learned your English as a child. Americans would say is, looking at population as singular, British English might use are, looking at population as referring back to multiple people,. So are you learning British or American English? Written work would be corrected in America if are were used, probably the opposite in Britain, although I didn't go through that school system.

Yep, it uk english this would be correct.

In my eyes (this might be wrong), it all depends on what the person saying it is thinking. For example, when one says "the team is winning", what he/she means is that the team is one entity, whereas if one would say "Real Madrid are winning", he/she would mean that all players on that team are winning. While the second might sound strange, and maybe these are not the best examples, I believe in some cases both ('is' and 'are') are correct.

It's not completely wrong, there are dialects that use it occasionally, but it certainly is VERY uncommon.. We usually don't use the with half unless we are referring to a specific half - like What happened to the half of the pie that I left in the refrigerator?

¨half the population¨ would imply that a half (divided by age ) of the population is less than 15.

¨The half of the population¨ would imply a specific half that is already chosen also happens to be under the age of 15. You could also say ¨the half of the population THAT is under 15 years old...¨which would give you the same info but again already is specifically separated in a way that ¨half of the population¨is not

Hola eshewan: You are correct that in many cases "menos que" is correct...EXCEPT when dealing with numbers. With numbers, it is "menos de". Chau.

English uses "is or are fifteen years old"" instead of have or has.

It's just a difference in the language that you need to get used to. Word for word translation can help when you want to construct correct Spanish sentences, but you need to be aware that it isn't always the right way to say it in normal speech, and Duo only sometimes encourages word for word translation (I wish they never would)

Spanish also says "I have hunger " Tengo hambre instead of I am hungry, I have thirst (Tengo sed) instead of I am thirsty. Portuguese does the same thing, and German does it also with some expressions. There are a lot more of these, which you will learn as you go. (Spanish speakers ask the same thing in reverse) The rule is - "because that's the way they say it"

It can be in some cases, such as in "half an apple" (media manzana), but it doesn't work in this case.

Hello Nadia894618: When you speak about age in Spanish, people are said to "have [x] years". ¿Cuántos años tiene usted?- literally "how many years do you have?' English says "how old are you?"