442A Exam Questions and Answers PDF — Free 50-Question Mock Exam

What's inside

• 50 original exam-style questions drawn from the six areas of our 442A Industrial Electrician bank — Motors & Controls, Safety & Code, PLCs, Instrumentation, Power Distribution, and Theory
• Every answer explained in the back of the PDF, so a wrong answer turns into something learned, not just a lost mark
• Works offline — study in the lunchroom, the truck, or anywhere without a signal. No account needed.

Want every question?

This mock exam is a 50-question slice. The 442A Complete Question Bank has all 130 questions with a full explanation for every answer, organized by this site's own topic areas (not one-to-one with the official Major Work Activities), in one printable offline PDF.

Corrections to the question banks are listed with dates on the question bank updates page.

What the 130 questions cover, and what to check

The free 50 are a sample of our full 130-question 442A bank. Industrial electrical work is not one subject but six that share a toolbox.

• Motors & Controls — 33 questions Three-phase induction motors, slip and synchronous speed, nameplate data, wye and delta connections and dual-voltage windings, across-the-line and reduced-voltage starting, reversing, overload selection and trip class, contactors and relays, ladder control logic, and variable frequency drives — parameters, carrier frequency, and the bearing currents drives can cause. Keep overload and short-circuit protection apart: the overload does not protect against a fault and the breaker does not protect against a slow overload, so know which device is doing what. Then the seal-in circuit — be able to read, and draw, three-wire start-stop control off the rung.
• Safety & Code — 23 questions Conductor ampacity and the correction and derating factors applied to it, box and raceway fill, bonding and grounding, hazardous location classification, shock and arc flash PPE selection, the electrically safe work condition, lockout, and proving a circuit dead before touching it. Two things to get right: applying temperature correction and conductor-count derating in the right order instead of picking whichever comes to mind, and hazardous location questions where the answer follows the classification of the area, not the equipment you would prefer to install.
• PLCs — 19 questions Processor and I/O architecture, discrete versus analog I/O, sinking and sourcing inputs, the scan cycle, addressing, timers and counters, and troubleshooting online with the program in front of you. Know the examine-if-open instruction against a normally closed field device: the instruction tests a bit in the data table, not the physical contact, and reading it as the contact is how a working circuit gets condemned.
• Instrumentation — 20 questions 4–20 mA current loops, two-, three- and four-wire transmitters, loop power and loop calibration, and the measurement of pressure, level, temperature and flow — differential pressure cells, RTDs and thermocouples, magnetic and vortex meters — plus span and zero, turndown, and direct versus reverse action. Practise converting milliamps to engineering units at speed (12 mA is not half of range until you take the 4 mA offset out first), and know lead-wire compensation on RTDs.
• Power Distribution — 18 questions Transformers — connections, ratio, polarity and taps — switchgear and motor control centres, single-line diagrams, protective devices and coordination, power factor correction, system grounding, and standby supplies. On a delta-wye transformer, secondary line voltage and phase voltage are not the same number; and keep reading a single-line past the point where the device symbols stop being obvious.
• Theory — 17 questions AC fundamentals: impedance, inductive and capacitive reactance, the power triangle of kW, kVAR and kVA, and the line-versus-phase relationships in wye and delta. The smallest area by count, but it feeds the others — a missing √3 turns a correct method into a wrong answer, and wye relationships do not answer delta questions.

A 50-question mock is a diagnostic, not a score

The Red Seal exam for this trade is 100 questions in a four-hour writing time, a little over two minutes each. Take the 50 in two hours and keep the code book shut, whatever you expect to have on the day.

• Sweep the recall questions first, calculations last Three-phase power, ampacity correction, loop conversions and transformer ratios eat clock. Answer everything you know cold, then come back with the time you saved rather than stalling on rung four.
• Dot every answer you guessed, as you answer it A guess that lands right looks identical to knowledge on the score sheet and nowhere else.
• Sort the misses into three piles, not two Calculation misses (theory, loops, transformer ratios), lookup misses (ampacity, fill, area classification), and reading misses (ladder logic, single-lines, loop diagrams). Do not mistake the third pile for a knowledge gap — redrawing the circuit fixes it faster than rereading the chapter.
• Study only the misses, then take fresh questions The explanation in the back tells you why the right answer is right; the point is to go back to the source after it. Re-sitting the same 50 measures how well you remember this paper.

How the Red Seal exam for Industrial Electrician is built

The Red Seal Program lists 100 questions for this trade across six Major Work Activities: common occupational skills (9), generating, distribution and service systems (23), wiring systems (20), rotating and non-rotating equipment and control systems (21), signalling and communication systems (10), and process control systems (17) (red-seal.ca exam information). Its Exam Preparation Guide states four choices with one correct answer, a 70% pass mark and a four-hour writing time.

Our six areas are our own grouping, not those blocks. Process control is where our PLC and Instrumentation questions live — 39 of our 130, against 17 of the official 100, because it is the part of the trade an apprentice can least afford to be shaky on. Theory and Safety & Code are spread through every official block rather than gathered into one, and we have no dedicated signalling and communication set, so read that block from the occupational standard directly. Your provincial or territorial apprenticeship authority administers the exam and rules on eligibility, scheduling and permitted reference material.

Questions from 442A apprentices

• Is this the same as the 309A Construction Electrician exam? No — separate trade, separate exam. Industrial work leans on motors, drives, PLCs and process control inside a running plant; construction leans on installation. If 309A is your ticket, the 309A quiz is the one to use.
• Do I need to know a specific PLC brand? No. The questions are on generic ladder instructions, I/O wiring and scan behaviour, so they hold whether your plant runs Allen-Bradley, Siemens or Omron. Brand-specific software menus are not exam material.
• Can I use a code book? Our PDF is written to be done closed book. Whether the real exam permits reference material, and which code edition applies, is set by your provincial or territorial apprenticeship authority — ask them.
• Why is Theory only 17 questions? Because it is not a separate subject in practice. Reactance, the power triangle and the line-to-phase relationships turn up inside the motor, transformer and loop questions, so theory decides far more than 17 marks in this bank.