My teacher said that if you lift a 5 pound sack, you are doing work but if you carry the sack, you aren’t doing any work. Why is that?
When you lift the sack, you are pushing it upward (to support its weight) and it is moving upward. Since the force you exert on the sack and the distance it is traveling are in the same direction, you are doing work on the sack. As a result, the sack’s energy is increasing, as evidenced by the fact that it is becoming more and more dangerous to a dog sitting beneath it.
But when you carry the sack horizontally at a steady pace, the upward force you exert on the sack and the horizontal distance it travels are at right angles to one another. You don’t do any work on the sack in that case. The evidence here is that the sack doesn’t become any more dangerous; its speed doesn’t increase and neither does its altitude. It just shifts from one place to an equivalent one to its side.