Which glass type crumbles into chunks when broken?

• A. Safety glass
• B. Laminated glass
• C. Plate glass
• D. Tempered glass

Answer: (D)

Understanding how different glass types fail helps you judge safety and application. Tempered glass is heat-treated to put strong compressive forces on its surface. When it breaks, those stresses release all at once, causing the glass to fracture into many small, dull, grainy pieces rather than large, sharp shards. That is why it’s described as breaking into chunks—a characteristic designed to reduce injury risk.

In contrast, plate glass (the old term for ordinary soda-lime glass) tends to shatter into large, sharp shards. Laminated glass, with its plastic interlayer, tends to crack and stay in one piece rather than breaking apart into loose fragments. Safety glass is a broad term that covers tempered or laminated types, so its breakage behavior depends on the specific construction.

So the glass type that breaks into chunks when shattered is tempered glass.