How long it lasts, what wears first, and why a dark floor shows wear differently from a pale one.
7 questions in this harvest fall under this subject. 5 answered so far.
Three figures decide most terrazzo specifications: flexural strength, water absorption, and wear. The Chinese standard grades all three in four bands. The important detail is how each is reported, because that is where two laboratories hand you two different numbers for the same slab.
Terrazzo is quoted on flexural strength, not compressive strength, because it is a topping: it spans a little and it bends before it crushes. JC/T 507-2022 sets four grades, from an average of 5.0 MPa on standard terrazzo up to 15.0 MPa on high-performance cement artificial stone, and it requires both an average and a single-minimum figure.
By a rotating ball bearing pressed against the surface under a fixed load, and the result is a wear index where higher is better. JC/T 507-2022 requires a floor product to reach not less than 1.5. The method behind it is GB/T 16925, which was approved in 1997 and is still the one the terrazzo standard calls up.
A sand-cushion cement system if the floor can take 25 to 30 pounds per square foot and there is three inches of height to fill. Epoxy if it cannot — at 3 to 4 pounds it goes on a suspended floor, over a renovation, and around an old slab with cracks in it. The finish does not decide this. The structure does.
Longer than the alternatives it replaces, and for a specific reason: it can be re-ground. A terrazzo floor that has dulled after twenty years is ground back and polished again, which returns it closer to new without replacing anything. That ability is the difference between a floor that lasts forty years and one that lasts fifteen.
These are the phrasings people typed, not headings we invented. Where one has an answer the link is live; where it does not it is printed plain, and that is deliberate — a printed question with nothing behind it is an honest promise, and hiding it is not.
Ordered by how many questions each one holds.