Actually it's a quick test/quiz about how knowledgeable a person is regarding the most basic facts about microbes (or germs).
Go ahead and take the quiz here to see if you know enough and if you'll do better than I did. I nailed 8 of 11 questions. Not good enough for a Biology student like me though! Lol.
Here are some of the interesting facts that everyone should know about germs (click "Read More").
NOTE: If you are planning to quiz yourself, do not read the succeeding paragraphs unless you have taken the quiz. These are some of the answers to the questions.
1. The telephone is one dirty whatever.
Chances are, you are reaching out and touching hundreds of thousands of germs every time you pick up the phone. There are 25,000 germs per square inch on phones. Desks were a sick second, with 21,000 germs per square inch. The office toilet seat has a mere 49 germs per square inch. (Of course, individual results may vary.)
2. Makeup tester products at department stores are not safe!
Makeup tester products found they were loaded with staph bacteria and E. coli (which comes from poop). Even when store employees scrape away the used stuff or use antimicrobial wipes and alcohol dips, samples still get dirty. And the more shoppers there are, the worse things get, making Saturday the sickest day of all to test makeup.
3. Bad mouth. Really bad mouth.
There are more than 700 different species of microbes that live in the human mouth.
4. Toilets and toothbrushes. Urgh.
It is true that germs can escape a flushing toilet and contaminate things in the bathroom--such as toothbrushes. A flushing toilet sends an aerosol spray containing bacteria and viruses all around the bathroom for at least two hours after each flush. Please, people. Put the toilet seat down.
5. "Let there be light!" said Mr. Toothbrush.
Toothbrushes are often wet and encrusted with food and debris. Put them in the dark--like in your medicine cabinet--and you've created a germ nirvana. Storing them someplace light, dry, and away from the dreaded toilet-flush toxic plume--like near the bedroom window--is a better bet.
6. Wala pang one minute. Pwede pa yan!
It is a typical Pinoy notion (or maybe a joke) that when a food is dropped on the floor, you have this "one minute" window of time to pick it up before the food becomes "dirty". Well apparently, a Howard University student won an Ig Nobel prize for a research project she did as part of a summer job after high school. Dry floors, she found, generally don't have enough microbes on them to infect dropped morsels. With wet floors, this is not the case. (Also, the student researcher found women were slightly more likely than men to eat off the floor.)
7. Spongebob! You're not from the kitchen, right?
One sponge can have as many as 7 billion microbes growing in its damp, dark crevices. After that, the kitchen sink drain, the faucet, cutting boards, and fridge handles are areas you might want to wipe down with obsessive regularity.
8. Good heavens, what did you do?
Influenza got its name because people thought the flu was caused by the evil influence of the stars. It is actually caused by a virus, but before people knew that, they cast their blame to the heavens.
* information from MSN Encarta
No comments:
Post a Comment