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Breathing dirty air harms more than your lungs. It may also lead to cognitive decline, making you worse at maths and damaging your language skills.
Xiaobo Zhang at Peking University in Beijing and his colleagues compared cognitive test scores of 31,955 people in China over the age of 10 in 2010 and 2014, and matched the scores with official air quality data from the city where each test subject lived. They found that air pollution impaired both mathematics and verbal test performances, and …