The Essay Packet — Thirty Minutes, Then It Is Taken Away

How the section actually runs

At the beginning of the test you get an essay packet and thirty minutes with it. You may write on it, underline it and make notes on it during that half hour. When the time is up the packets are collected by FCTC staff and the questions about them come later, after the video section.

Some essays stay in your test booklet and can be referred to while you answer. The 35 questions in this section are drawn from both — the withdrawn packet and the printed ones — so part of it is recall and part of it is ordinary reading comprehension.

Reading for what you will be asked

Thirty minutes is enough to read a packet several times and remember almost nothing useful, which is the trap. Material read as a story leaves you with the gist, and the questions want the number, the order and the exception.

Give the first pass to shape — how many essays, what each is about. Spend the rest hunting the things questions are made of: figures, sequences, anything phrased as always, never, except or unless, and any sentence that singles one item out from the others.

• Attach every number to the thing it measures. A remembered 'thirty' with nothing attached to it earns nothing.
• Say the specifics back to yourself before the packet goes. Recognising a fact and recalling it are different abilities, and only one survives the page being collected.
• Notice which entries agree and which one differs. The odd one out is the most commonly asked fact in any table.

How RankHigh trains it

The same way it works on the day. Material appears, a clock runs for the official thirty minutes, the material is withdrawn, and the questions follow with no way back to it. Practising with the page still visible trains a skill the test does not measure.

Related guides

• What Is on the FCTC Firefighter Written Test
• The Video Section — What to Expect, and What RankHigh Does Not Do
• The Mechanical Reasoning Section — Levers, Pulleys and Gears