Chicago Firefighter study guide
Chicago Firefighter · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Chicago Firefighter exam is the entry-level selection assessment used by the City of Chicago to screen candidates for firefighter positions with the Chicago Fire Department. It is intended for candidates who meet the City's minimum qualifications and who are beginning, or considering, a career in fire suppression and emergency response. The assessment is structured around four equally weighted domains: General Written Ability, Reading Comprehension, Mechanical Reasoning, and Situational Judgment and Interpersonal Skills. Each domain carries the same weight, so no single section can carry a candidate's score on its own, and a weak area cannot be offset indefinitely by strength elsewhere. The Chicago Firefighter study guide has 4 sections and about 1,565 words.
01General Written Ability
General Written Ability tests your control of standard English in fire-service writing: incident narratives, memos, emails, and procedural notes. The exam emphasizes grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, word choice, and clarity, not literary flourish.
405 words, about 2 min02Reading Comprehension
Reading Comprehension tests whether you can extract accurate information from passages such as standard operating procedures, safety bulletins, technical descriptions, and incident narratives. Questions may ask for the main idea, a specific detail, a sequence of steps, a supported inference, the meaning of a term in context, or the author's purpose.
402 words, about 2 min03Mechanical Reasoning
Mechanical Reasoning tests basic physical principles behind fireground tools and systems: levers, pulleys, gears, friction, pressure, and fluid behavior. You do not need engineering mathematics, but you must apply relationships accurately and avoid everyday guesses.
391 words, about 2 min04Situational Judgment and Interpersonal Skills
Situational Judgment and Interpersonal Skills tests how you would act in fire-service situations involving teamwork, chain of command, safety, conflict, and public contact. The exam rewards judgment that protects life safety, follows policy, communicates respectfully, and keeps small problems from becoming incidents.
367 words, about 2 min