Work is an activity that requires physical or mental effort, usually for money. It can be done by a person who earns his or her livelihood or it can be a task that is a part of an individual’s daily life. Examples of work include a student who studies for exams, a musician who plays the flute, a businessman who thinks meticulously about his business deal, and a child who rides a bicycle on the circular path in a park every day.
Physicists define work as the energy that is transferred to or from an object by applying a force along a displacement. This is a scalar quantity and the SI unit of work is the joule (J).
A simple example of work is lifting a weight off the ground and placing it on a shelf. This requires a force that is equal to the weight of the object and a distance that is the height of the shelf (W= Fxd).
If an object moves in the direction of the applied force, it will displace that force. For example, throwing a ball that has been thrown with 10 N of force will cause it to travel 20 meters.
The total work done is the product of the force and the distance traveled, or d. This is called the work-equilibrium principle.
For a constant force aligned with the direction of motion, this is a positive amount of work. This is because the force transfers energy to the object in the form of kinetic energy.
However, if a force is aligned with the direction of movement but has a negative magnitude, then work is negative. This is because the force takes energy from the object.
There are many different ways to measure the amount of work that is being done. The most common is the metre-kilogram-second system, or MJ (newton per meter squared).
One MJ of force will cause an object to move in the direction of the force at a rate of 1 meter per second. This can be determined using a calculating device or with the help of an instrument, such as an accelerometer.
Another measurement of work is the angle between the applied force and the displacement. This is also a scalar quantity and the angle is known as theta. In cases where the angle between the force and the displacement is not 0 degrees or 90 degrees, there are more complex formulas that can be used to calculate the work.
In order to do this, you must divide the total distance that is being displaced by the force into smaller sections of equal size and then sum up the work that has been done in each section. This is the same method that we learned in the first chapter of this textbook, and it can be helpful when evaluating the efficiency of an operation.
