As long as it is well-paid, stable and safe, work provides many benefits, including a sense of purpose, identity, and self-worth. It is also a vehicle for social interaction, and an opportunity to contribute to the success of others. Moreover, it supports the economy and allows people to afford to live, eat, buy clothes, rent, travel, etc. Work also gives people a chance to meet like-minded individuals and develop their own unique talents, skills, and interests. However, for some, work can be a source of stress and anxiety. For example, lower-income workers are more likely to say they don’t have a good relationship with their employer and feel they do not receive recognition or rewards for their work.
In physics, “work” refers to the transformation of energy from one place to another. It is defined as the scalar product of force and displacement, where force is a vector and distance is a scalar. The unit of work is the joule, the same as that of energy. It can be applied to any object, irrespective of its mass or shape, and can cause changes in either the object’s kinetic or potential energy.
Work can be positive, negative, or zero, depending on the direction of displacement with respect to the force. For example, if an object is displaced perpendicular to the force that moves it, the work done by the force is zero. If an object is displaced parallel to the force that moves it, the work is positive. If an object is displaced at an angle with respect to the force that moves it, the work it does is negative.
For a body moving along a curve C with a velocity v, the small amount of work dW that occurs over an instant dt is calculated as
Work can be measured in units such as newton-metres (N