HR 134 Chapter 7 Work can be either positive or negative.

If the particle on which a force acts has a component of motion opposite to the direction of the force, the work done by that force is negative.

A person holding a heavy weight at rest in the air may say that he is doing hard work and he may work hard in the physiological sense but from the point of view of physics we say that he is not doing any work. We say this because the applied force causes no displacement. The word work is used only in the strict send of Eq. 7-2. When a person lowers an object to the floor, the work done on the object by the upward force of his hand holding the object is negative. Basic and cell mean quite different things in chemistry and biology than in everyday language. Conservative forces We have interpreted the KE of a body as its ability to do work by virtue of its motion. It is clear that at the completion of a round trip the ability of the block to do work remains the same; it has been conserved. The elastic force exerted by an ideal spring, and other forces that act in this same way, are called conservative. The force of gravity is also conservative; if we throw a ball vertically upward, it will (if we assume air resistance to be negligible) return to our hand with the same KE that it had when it left our hand.

If, however, a particle on which one or more forces act returns to its initial position with either more or less KE than it had initially, then in a round trip its ability to do work had been changed. In this case the ability to do work had not been conserved and at least one of the forces acting is labeled nonconvervative.