Q.(a) Discuss the risk factors associated with suicides. What are the symptoms that help in identifying students in distress? Examine some ways to foster positive self-esteem in students.

Life Skills Application – From Intuition to Precision

You already use life skills every day, whether you notice it or not. When you decide how to split study time between Physics and Chemistry, you're applying decision-making. When a friend is upset and you listen without interrupting, you're using empathy. When you're in a group project and someone isn't pulling their weight, you're drawing on interpersonal skills to handle it.

Life skills are not a separate subject you learn from a textbook. They are the mental and social tools that let you navigate real situations — at home, in school, with friends, and later at work. The "application" part means you don't just know what these skills are; you actually use them in a concrete situation.

The Precise Statement

Life Skills Application is the process of deliberately using a set of core psychosocial competencies — such as self-awareness, critical thinking, creative thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, effective communication, interpersonal relationships, empathy, and coping with stress and emotions — to handle the demands and challenges of everyday life in a constructive, ethical, and effective manner.

In the Indian exam context (CBSE, ICSE, state boards), this often appears in Value Education, Health and Physical Education, or General Studies papers. You may be given a scenario — a student facing peer pressure, a conflict at home, a career choice dilemma — and asked to identify which life skills are being applied and how.

The Core Life Skills (WHO Framework)

The World Health Organization has identified ten core life skills. For exams, you need to know them and be able to spot them in a story:

Hyperactivity Characteristics – A First Look

The Intuition

Imagine a classroom. Most students sit reasonably still, listen, and raise their hands before speaking. Now picture a student who seems to be driven by a motor — they can't stay seated, they fidget constantly, they blurt out answers, and they talk excessively. That restless, excessive, and often poorly controlled movement and speech is what we call hyperactivity.

The key intuition: hyperactivity is not just "being active." It is activity that is inappropriate for the situation — too much, too fast, and too hard to control. A child running on a playground is normal; the same child running in a library during a test is hyperactive.

The Precise Statement

In clinical and educational psychology, hyperactivity is one of the two core symptom domains of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (the other being inattention). The characteristics of hyperactivity are:

Hyperactivity refers to a persistent pattern of excessive motor activity, restlessness, and impulsivity that is developmentally inappropriate, occurs across multiple settings, and interferes with functioning or development.

The DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition) lists these specific hyperactivity-impulsivity symptoms (for children aged 17 or younger, at least 6 of the following must have persisted for ≥6 months):