Short answers, pulled from the story.
Work refers to the intentional activities individuals engage in to meet their own needs and wants, as well as those of others or organizations. In economics, work is human labor that, alongside other factors of production, contributes to the creation of goods and services and is treated as a service in standard economic theory.
Economists often use the three-sector model. The primary sector extracts food, raw materials, and other resources from the environment, the secondary sector manufactures physical products and provides utilities, and the tertiary sector provides services and helps administer the economy. Some propose a knowledge-based quaternary sector, but it is neither standardized nor universally accepted.
Specialization and advance planning are common features that distinguish work. A sport is a job for a professional athlete who earns a livelihood from it but a hobby for someone playing for fun, and a paramedic on duty is working while the same person giving first aid as an off-duty bystander is not.
Critics of work include Paul Lafargue in The Right to Be Lazy, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, and Bob Black in The Abolition of Work. Real-world efforts to reduce the economic necessity for lifelong work first emerged through retirement and more recently through experimentation with universal basic income.
German sociologist Max Weber hypothesized that European capitalism originated in a Protestant work ethic, which emerged with the Reformation. Some Christian theologians draw on the Book of Genesis, where humans are created in the image of God and Adam is placed in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
According to the World Bank, the global rate of child labour decreased from 25% to 10% between the 1960s and the early years of the 21st century. UNICEF and the ILO estimated that 168 million children aged 5 to 17 worldwide were involved in some sort of child labour in 2013.