I spent 30 minutes working this out and got it wrong! Someone PLEASE explain it
ID: 1965868 • Letter: I
Question
I spent 30 minutes working this out and got it wrong! Someone PLEASE explain it to me!!You see an optical illusion of an ever-upward spiral staircase. The climber trudges up and up and never gets anywhere, going in circles instead. Suppose the staircase is provided with a narrow ramp, allowing the tired stair-climber to push a wheelbarrow up the stairs. The loaded wheelbarrow weighs 300.0 N, and the ramp makes an angle of 15.0° with the horizontal, all along its length. The ramp consists of four straight sections, with slant lengths 12.0 m, 8.0 m, 20.0 m, and 20.0 m. How much work does the climber do on the wheelbarrow when he pushes it up the ramp from the red marker, all the way around the loop, and (supposedly) back to the red marker again? An ordinary inclined-plane computation will give an accurate value for the work. (In the illusory illustration, the fact that he ends up where he started means that, impossibly, he does NO work.)
Explanation / Answer
the work done by the climber will be stored either as the potential energy or kinetic energy within the wheel barrow 1 there will be no K.E. as in between the initial and final positions there is no change in velocity 2 there might be gravitational work which might be stored in the barrow as Mgh but since the final and the initial height are the same there is no gravitational work so effectively he does no work on the barrow :)