Question

I am a little confused with two similarly looking to me questions that have different explanations and I’d like to understand why. First question is this: “Which method does less work against gravity: carrying a 1 kg weight up 50 m by taking the stairs or taking the elevator. Explain”. Here we say the work is the same and that the path traveled doesn’t matter and use w=mgh where H is just a vertical component.

The second question is “a clerk can lift cylindrical packages 1 meter vertically or can roll them up a 2-meter-long ramp to the same elevation. With the ramp, what is the applied force required? What about work?” So, why in the second case we use formula W=FD and take into consideration the TOTAL distance clerk has to travel up (so the path matters here) the ramp and not just vertical component distance, but in the first case even though we would travel longer distance zigzagging up the stairs but we only take into consideration the vertical component and use formula W=mgh? Please, help.

Answer 1