Yes, but more experienced mappers will highly recommend you not to use the carve tool. This may seem strange at first, but once you get to work with bigger and more complex maps, you'll see that clipping, vertex manipulating and especially, the habit to create shapes from individual brushes rather than with carving or hollowing, gives you much more control over the map and makes it easier to maintain.
A problem with carving is that with nearly any shape more complex than a cube, you often get vertexes not aligned to the grid. During the compile process, these vertexes are aligned to the grid. This can cause really thin leaks in your level. Or, should you have a brush behind this carved brush, it'll add several w_poly's, and it decreases compiling time somewhat.
So, really, individual brushes combined with clipping or VM'ing is much better...