The chapter is about order, not about machines
People expect a demolition test to be about excavators and attachments. It is mostly about sequence: what is holding up what, and what happens to the rest of the structure when a particular element comes out.
That is why so many questions here start from something found rather than something planned. A basement discovered under a slab, a material that was not on the survey, a wall that looked like a partition and turns out to be providing lateral restraint. In each case the correct answer is to stop and refer it back, and the plausible wrong answer is the one a competent crew would improvise on the day.
Three things kill people in demolition
- An unplanned sequence, where something comes out in an order nobody assessed and the structure finds a load path that was never there.
- Asbestos disturbed by somebody who was not looking for it, usually because the survey on file was a management survey rather than a demolition one.
- Services that were supposed to be dead, in a building that has been empty for months and still has a live incomer.
The bank is weighted towards those three rather than spread evenly, because that is where the real risk sits and where the chapter puts its weight.
It is the operatives test plus a chapter
The specialist tests are supersets. Every core question can still come up, so roughly seven questions in ten on a demolition paper are core material you would have met on the operatives test. If the five core areas are shaky, that is what will fail you, and the demolition questions will not be why.
The score here separates demolition out as its own line for exactly that reason. Forty two with every miss in the demolition section and forty two with the misses scattered are two different problems, and a single total cannot tell you which one you have.
Add the two pools together and the bank looks healthier
Two papers of K questions drawn from a bank of N share about K squared over N questions. On a specialist test that arithmetic hides a trap, because the paper draws from two pools of very different sizes.
Add them together and the bank looks healthy. The demolition pool on its own is smaller, so the demolition questions come back sooner than the combined figure suggests. Both numbers are reported above the test rather than the flattering one, and the revision mode is the answer to it: it comes back to what you have not yet answered right twice, rather than drawing a fresh paper and hoping.
Where the answers come from
Every question cites the HSE guidance it was written from and links to it, so a wrong answer lands you on the paragraph rather than on a forum thread. On demolition that matters, because most of what people believe about the subject was learned from whoever trained them and has never been checked against anything.
Everything runs in your browser. Progress is kept on this device with no account and nothing uploaded.
Common questions
Which card needs the demolition specialist test?
The demolition specialist test sits behind demolition occupational qualifications and the cards that map to them. If your qualification is in demolition, this is the paper. That is the operatives content plus the demolition chapter rather than a different test entirely.
What is the difference between a management survey and a demolition survey?
A management survey is deliberately non-intrusive: it finds asbestos that could be disturbed during normal occupation. A refurbishment and demolition survey breaks into the building to look inside voids, above ceilings and within the fabric. A building can have a perfectly valid management survey on file and still be nowhere near ready to demolish, and that distinction comes up repeatedly in this chapter.
Why is so much of the chapter about the sequence?
Because the sequence is the entire safety case. It says what holds up what, and in which order things can come out without a collapse nobody intended. Almost every demolition fatality traces back to something removed out of order, or to somebody improvising when the sequence stopped fitting what they found.
What is the pass mark on the demolition paper?
Forty five of fifty, inside forty five minutes. Five wrong is the whole allowance and there is no partial credit. Fifteen of the fifty come from the demolition chapter and the other thirty five from the core operatives areas, so somebody who knows demolition inside out and has not looked at the core material since their last card can still fail comfortably.
Are these the actual CITB demolition questions?
They are not, and they could not legitimately be. The live bank is sold by CITB in GT100 rather than published, so anybody claiming to have the real questions either bought them or copied them. These are written from free HSE guidance, principally the demolition and temporary works material, and each answer carries the link it was written from so you can check it rather than take it on trust.
Why does it warn me that the demolition questions repeat sooner?
Because they do, and the combined figure would hide it. A specialist paper draws from a large core pool and a smaller subject pool, so the total looks healthy while the part you came for repeats faster. Both numbers are shown above the test.
Does my demolition progress mix with the operatives mock?
It is. Each test writes to its own key in your browser, so the demolition record and the operatives record never touch each other. On the specialist side the pool is twenty eight and fifteen come up per paper, which means a second attempt repeats about eight of them. The page prints that specialist figure separately instead of averaging it into the fifty, because the average would hide the half you came here for.