Hygiene, Sanitation and Environmental Awareness
This section tests personal hygiene routines, methods of making water safe, the route by which diseases spread, and household waste handling. Questions often ask you to classify a disease or a waste item.
Personal hygiene
Bath daily, brush teeth twice, keep nails short, wash hair regularly, and wash hands with soap before eating or cooking and after using the toilet. For menstrual hygiene, change a clean cloth or sanitary pad every 4–6 hours, wash it well and dry it in sunlight.
Safe water
Boil for 10–15 minutes, or use chlorine tablets, or a ceramic candle filter. Store water in a covered container with a tap or a ladle - never dip hands into it.
Disease routes
Water-borne: cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A, dysentery. Vector-borne: malaria (female Anopheles), dengue (Aedes aegypti, which bites by day), filariasis. Food-borne: staphylococcal poisoning from cooked food kept warm for hours.
Sanitation and waste
Use a sanitary latrine; a soak pit or compost pit handles kitchen and garden waste. Segregate at source - green for wet compostable waste, blue for dry recyclables, separate hazardous collection for batteries, medicines and sanitary waste.
Worked example
A household discards vegetable peels, a plastic wrapper, a glass bottle, leftover rice and a used dry cell. Reasoning: peels and rice are biodegradable and go to the green bin for compost; wrapper and bottle are dry recyclables; the cell is hazardous and needs separate collection, never the wet bin.
Traps that cost marks
Saying boiling needs only a moment; confusing malaria and dengue vectors; placing batteries in wet waste; describing chlorination as filtration.