Suppose you lived in a pre-industrial society and needed to lift a heavy (20 kg) block a height of 5 m and had two choices for how to accomplish your task: you could use a lever with a short arm of 1 m and a long arm of 10 m. you'd place the block on the end of the short arm and apply force at the very end of the long arm. you could use a ramp with a length of 8 m and place the block on a cart with wheels. which choice would you make? be sure to discuss differences between the effort force of the two options in your answer.

Let's break the question into two parts:

1) The force needed in Ramp scenario.
2) The effort force needed in the lever scenario.

1. Ramp Scenario: 
In an incline, the only component of cart's weight(mg) that is in the direction of motion is . Therefore the effort force in this case must be equal or greater than .

Now we need to find . is the angle between the incline of the ramp and the ground. 

Since the height is 5m and the length of the ramp is 8m,  would be 5/8 or 0.625. Now that you have , mutiple it with mg.

=> m*g*  = 20 * 10 * 5 / 8. (Taking g = 10 m/s² for simplicity) = 125N
Therefore, the minimum Effort force you would require in this case is 125N.

2. Lever Scenario:
Just apply "moment action" in this case, which is:


= ?

= mg = 20 * 10 = 200N
= 10m
= 1m

Plug-in the values in the above equation:
= 200/10= 20N

As 20N << 125N, the best choice is to use lever.