Name: How can we breathe cleaner air? | FT
Uploaded: 2020-03-07T16:14:50.000Z
Duration: 7 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We often talk about one city being more polluted

than another, but two people living in the same city

Modal verbs - B1

might experience vastly different levels of pollution.

To measure this we've given our correspondents around the world

a new device that tracks their personal exposure to air

pollution, to see how it might change their behaviour and what

The device measures four types of air pollution

but we're mainly interested in two; particulate matter, that

can penetrate the lungs leading to cardiovascular and

respiratory diseases; and nitrogen dioxide

emissions from vehicles, which also contributes

to respiratory diseases such as bronchitis and asthma.

allowing our team to track their exposure as they

Beijing is a city known for its pollution.

crazy about not letting them outside, especially on days

when the pollution was so high that you couldn't

But now it's much more common to see blue skies in Beijing again

and I don't like to keep kids to indoors.

I bike to work and I let them play outside as much as I can.

Well, the good news is pollution levels in Beijing

But I was surprised to see that my exposure still increased

Whether I bike to work or walk the kids to camp

got a ways to go before we can breathe easy in Beijing.

stuck in traffic, which is not what I planned to measure

this week, but it's become increasingly clear

It's a few days later and I'm stuck in traffic again.

I've been pleasantly surprised by the quality here in Lagos.

But when it does get bad even the most fortunate folks

in town like me aren't protected by our air conditioned cars.

They're no match for a dump truck next to us in traffic.

For the average Lagosian it's infinitely worse.

Now that I have the sensor one of the things I want to check

But because of the exhaust from black cabs, and buses,

and trucks, by the time I get to the office

my throat is usually feeling a bit scratchy.

Would the air be better if I took a bus, or the Underground,

and the air pollution has been high on average.

I switched between cycling, taking the bus,

And while the type of pollution I was exposed to changed

the level of air pollution really didn't.

big episodes of particulate matter sweeping

was that when it's polluted outside you just

Well, this is my neighbourhood in Sao Paulo, it's quite leafy.

Although it is relatively close to the city centre where air

And sometimes I go to report in the slums

that the people who live in those slums, in those favelas,

breathe an air of worst quality - more polluted than the one

But now that I have the sensor I can go out and find out.

What... it transpires that from monitors' readings,

good air and bad air could be quite democratic here in Sao

I've got very high pollution readings around the area where

I live, my leafy neighbourhood so to speak,

and quite low or moderate pollution readings in poor

areas, in slums like this favela - Paraisopolis.

There was some obvious peaks of high pollution in the city

and very low readings of pollution in, let's say,

posher areas, for example, literally right across

the street from where the governor of the state of Sao

So it seems that, for me, in order to be able to breathe

cleaner air, I may have to move to a different neighbourhood.

If you're looking to avoid pollution altogether

that turns out to be basically impossible.

And if you try to escape one type of pollution,

you might find yourself exposed to another.

You can avoid pollution by staying inside,

but that also doesn't seem like a good answer.

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How can we breathe cleaner air? | FT

stick

obvious

matter

experience