"From the Expat Blog, Decoding the Air Quality Index in Beijing"

 
ARTICLE: When I moved to China in 2011, I was a pollution innocent. Sure, I had heard about China’s air pollution. I had even tasted it,─literally, in the late 1990s, when the air was full of black coal particles.

During my first few weeks living there, Beijing was going through a clean-air snap. I joked to my wife, Deb, who was then back in Washington, D.C., that the sky looked like Vermont’s. My apartment was so overheated that I left the window open to let in cool air.

It didn’t take me long to wise up. Living in China is like being in a junior high-school science experiment. I was the plant in the science-fair terrarium, and some kid with glasses was blowing smoke at me and closing the top of the terrarium to record how long I’d take to crumple.

Like nearly all expats, I began obsessively checking the U.S. Embassy’s hourly tweets of pollution readings. I learned that the Air Quality Index, which is used all over the world, goes from 1 to 500, with 1 being Vermont and 500 being Hades.

1 to 50: “Good,” according to the AQI. On such days in Beijing, you look at the sky with an appreciation you’ve never had before. Life is good.
51 to 100: “Moderate.” The sky still looks OK, but stepping outside makes your eyes water. Something is a little off.
101 to 150: “Unhealthy for sensitive groups.” There’s a faint smell in the air. You find yourself sneezing more than usual. There’s gunk in your nose. You get ticked off easily.
151 to 200: “Unhealthy.” You step outside and find a metallic taste in your mouth. Buildings 50 feet away appear in a haze. You clear your throat a lot, as if you’ve been laughing. You’re not laughing.
201 to 250: “Very Unhealthy.” Throat-clearing brings up a lot of phlegm. The sun looks dim through the haze, like a 30-watt bulb. This must be the way sun looks from Mars, you figure.
251 to 500: “Hazardous.” You can taste the air the moment you wake up, even though you are inside your apartment and the windows are closed. Your cat’s fur smells funny. Outside, the world seems muffled, and the tickle in your throat extends down into your lungs and rests there like a tiny gremlin. You plan a trip to Tokyo or any city outside China.
Above 500: Yes, it actually goes beyond the scale. In Beijing, these are called “crazy bad” days. That was the term the embassy used in 2010. Program designers didn’t expect such horrific readings and tacked on a frivolous name, never expecting it to be broadcast. Individuals familiar with the embassy’s antipollution efforts said the embassy picked a more neutral term, “beyond index.” But “crazy bad” became part of the Beijing vernacular.

SUMMARY:  This article goes over the experiences of an American living in Beijing for the first time and how the air quality impacted both his life and his health. It's very interesting to read his descriptions on the changes within the air quality and how China described various conditions. The government labels terms in almost in a lacksadaisical kind of way and not really hard-hitting phrases that properly describe the seriousness of their air.

LINK: http://www.wsj.com/articles/from-the-expat-blog-decoding-the-air-quality-index-in-beijing-1441654380