The FireTEAM Study Guide. Study the Right Things, Rank Top of the List.

1. Human Relations

What it asks. Twenty-eight filmed scenarios play out with actors: a crew conflict, a citizen at a scene, a supervisor, a probationary firefighter, a partner having a bad shift. After each one you answer twice on the same scenario. First: which is the best course of action. Then: which is the worst. Seventy-six questions in fifty-seven minutes across twenty-eight scenarios works out to roughly two minutes per scenario including the video, so there is no time to deliberate.

How it is delivered. On video, one pass. You cannot rewind, pause or re-watch. Tone of voice, body language and who is standing where carry information the transcript would not, and the exam expects you to use it. This is the heaviest section at almost every department that publishes a weighting, which makes it the correct place to start studying regardless of what you feel weakest at.⁴

Four priorities, in this order. When two options compete, the one higher on this list wins. Apply the same list twice: once looking for the option that serves it best, once for the option that violates it worst.

• Life safety first. Anything that delays, interrupts or degrades patient care or crew safety outranks every other consideration, including embarrassment, chain of command and being liked.
• Transparency with the officer. Safety-critical information reaches the officer. Options that conceal, delay or privately "handle" it are wrong, however loyal they sound.
• De-escalation with the public. With civilians, address the obstruction directly, explain briefly, keep working. Options that assert authority you do not have, or that escalate to win the argument, cost points.
• Accountability for your own state. Fatigue, anger, a mistake you made: you name it and you act on it. Options where you cover for yourself are scored the way concealment is scored.
• Then rank by consequence, not by tone. The worst option is the one with the worst outcome, not the one that sounds rudest. A blunt but safe answer beats a warm but unsafe one every time.

Practise both halves on the same scenario every time. If you only ever answer "what would I do", you are training half of this section.

2. Mechanical Reasoning

What it asks. An animated factory runs on screen: belts, gear trains, pulleys, levers, valves, tanks under pressure. You are asked how the system behaves, which way something turns, what moves faster, what happens when a component is changed, and what to do when the machinery stops working. Forty-three minutes across thirty-six questions is a little over seventy seconds each, which is comfortable compared with the other sections, so the difficulty is the reasoning rather than the clock.

How it is delivered. On video, like Human Relations. The system is shown running before you are asked about it. That is the whole difference between this section and the static-diagram mechanical tests most candidates practise on: you have to read a moving system, not a labelled picture, and the follow-up troubleshooting questions assume you watched what actually happened.

• Direction reverses at every mesh. Two gears in mesh turn opposite ways. Three gears in a row: the first and third turn the same way. Count the meshes, do not guess from the picture.
• An idler changes direction, not final speed. A gear in the middle of a train slows the ratio on the way in and speeds it back up on the way out. The output speed depends on the first and last gear only.
• Small gear drives big gear: slower and stronger. Fewer teeth driving more teeth means less speed and more torque. Reverse it for more speed and less torque. Same logic for pulley diameters on a belt.
• A movable pulley halves the force and doubles the distance. Two rope sections carry the load, so you pull half the weight over twice the length. A fixed pulley changes direction only, and never gives you an advantage.
• The effort arm excludes the fulcrum. Mechanical advantage is effort arm divided by load arm, both measured from the fulcrum. Using total length instead of the remaining length is the single most common lever mistake.
• Machines never create energy. Whatever you save in force you pay in distance, and the other way around. If an option offers you both, it is wrong.

The other two principles in the rules list appear as worked items in the self-check below: a 12-foot pike pole used as a lever, and a 200 pound load on a single movable pulley.

3. Math

What it asks. Arithmetic, fractions, percentages, ratios and proportions, dressed in fireground situations: tank capacities and flow rates, ladder angles, call volumes, hose lengths, response times. The mathematics is middle-school level. Nothing here needs algebra beyond a proportion.

How it is delivered. On video, at a fixed pace, with no calculator and no scratch paper. Thirty-one questions in twenty-five minutes is roughly forty-eight seconds each, and that is the entire difficulty of the section. You are not being tested on whether you can do the arithmetic. You are being tested on whether you can do it in your head, once, while a clock you do not control keeps moving.

• Net rates before gross rates. If something fills while it drains, subtract first. Water out minus water in is the only rate that matters, and the gross figure is always offered as an answer.
• Anchor every percentage on ten percent. Ten percent is a decimal point move. Five percent is half of that, twenty percent is double, fifteen percent is ten plus five. Build the number you need out of tens and halves instead of multiplying.
• Check the direction of every ratio. Say the ratio out loud as a sentence with units: "one foot out for every four feet up." Then decide whether the answer should be bigger or smaller than the number you were given, before you compute anything.
• Estimate the size of the answer first. Two seconds deciding "this is around 5, not around 50" kills most trap options before you do the arithmetic.
• Do not round to make the division easy. Rounding 18 to 16 because it divides by 4 nicely produces a wrong answer that is sitting in the options waiting for you.
• Answer everything. An unanswered item scores zero. A guess between two survivors is worth about fifty percent. Never leave one blank because you ran out of clock.

Two more no-calculator items, one on percentage anchoring and one on ratio direction, are in the free self-check below with the same worked explanations.

4. Reading

What it asks. Short passages taken from fire service training material, with words removed. You choose the word that fits the blank. It is a vocabulary-in-context section, not a comprehension section: you are rarely asked what the passage means, you are asked which word belongs in that slot.

How it is delivered. On screen, at your own pace, which is the only section where the pace is yours. That sounds like relief until you divide: twenty-seven items in fifteen minutes is thirty-three seconds each, including reading the passage. This is the shortest section on the test and the one candidates most often run out of time on, because they treat it as easy and read every passage twice.

• Read the sentence, not the passage. The answer lives in the clause around the blank almost every time. Read the surrounding sentence properly and skim the rest.
• Place every term on the incident timeline. Before arrival, size-up. During, attack, ventilation, rescue, exposure protection. After knockdown, salvage and overhaul. Most wrong options are right words from the wrong phase.
• Decide the part of speech first. If the blank needs a noun for a thing that was done, half the options fall away before you have thought about meaning.
• Fit the whole sentence, not the half you read. Trap options work with the first six words and fail on the last four. Read to the end of the sentence before committing.
• One pass, thirty-three seconds, then move. Guess the best survivor and go. Two items lost to over-checking cost more than one item guessed wrong.
• Build vocabulary in context, not in lists. Learn terms inside a sentence that shows the phase they belong to. Flashcards teach recognition, and recognition is what the distractors exploit.

5. The Part Nobody Studies: the Process Around the Test

The Public Safety Self Assessment. Many departments also require the Public Safety Self Assessment, Parts 1 and 2, in your NTN account. Part 1 is timed at 45 minutes and has to be finished in one sitting. Most candidates learn it exists when it appears in their to-do list, usually at the worst possible moment.⁵ Check your NTN account for it today, before you start studying anything else, so it does not surprise you the night before.

Your score is shared, and it follows you. Your result goes to every department you designate and stays valid for one year. That is why the ranking matters more than the pass: one sitting sets your position with every department on your list for twelve months.

Retesting is not a free reset. There is a minimum three month wait between administrations, and the retest deletes your previous scores and the department designations attached to them.³ Only the newest result counts, which cuts both ways: a retest can lift you, and it can also replace a score you were happy with.

Confirm the cut score with your department, not with a prep site. Ergometrics publishes no candidate-facing passing score. Each department sets its own, and the published minimums move by twenty points between the two departments we cite below.⁴ Asking the hiring department for its current threshold is a normal question and they answer it.