Have you ever been assigned a chapter to read for homework? After you finish you may think to yourself, "That was a lot of work!" You might be surprised to learn that in the scientific sense, reading a chapter is not work at all!In science, work is defined as the action that results when a force causes an object to move in the direction of the force. While reading the chapter, you may have put a lot of mental effort into reading, but you were not using force to move an object. Therefore, in the scientific sense, you were not doing work.