The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of different methods of hand washing by counting the number of bacteria on the hand surface. Eighteen clinicians were chosen and divided into three groups, consisting of six clinicians each. Culturing of the right raw palms of all individuals was performed. Individuals in the control group washed hands for 5 seconds with antimicrobial soap. Group 1 washed their hands for 10 seconds with antimicrobial soap. Group 2 washed with an instant alcohol-based hand sanitizer. After the respective washes, re-culturing of the right raw palm was done for each member of all groups. The colony-forming units (CFU) were calculated at each time point, and the reduction rate of CFU among the three groups were statistically evaluated using student t-test. All groups showed a significant decrease in CFU, according to the time applied (P<0.01). In addition, the reduction rate of CFU between the groups were statistically evaluated with ANOVA (P<0.01). It showed statistically difference between the control group and group 1, control group and group 2. The present study confirmed that the hand washing method with antimicrobial soap for 10 seconds and hand sanitizer, including alcohol, were excellent for decreasing the number of bacteria on the hand surface.

This study deals with the discourse functions of the response particles in a split interrogative (hereinafter, SI), thereby contributing to effectively identifying the characteristics of the tag part in SI. I provide a piece of evidence, through the corpus data, that the tag part must be a non-wh-question and essentially functions as a biased polar question. The data tell us that the interlocutors can choose whether to use the SI or a regular question. Through the data that the speakers select a regular question, this paper tries to provide the evidence. In the process of analyzing their functions in SI, this study demonstrates that these particles must have a referential scope in picking up their antecedents in the previous question: a wide or narrow scope in referring to their antecedents. This characteristic leads us to identify the biased property of the tag question, therefore arguing that this tag must be a biased polar question. In the course of these works, we figured out that the addressees apparently take three strategies to respond to the split interrogative: to respond only the wh-question, the tag part, or both.