Think back to the last time you configured a Windows workstation network card for TCP/IP. You went to the Control Panel, clicked on the Network icon, added TCP/IP to your NIC, selected TCP/IP --> Name of your NIC, and clicked on Properties. You then did one of two things. Either you selected "Obtain an IP address automatically" (if you use DHCP), or you selected "Specify an IP address". In the latter case, you manually configured, at a minimum, an IP address and a subnet mask. You may also have configured a gateway IP address.
What exactly is the significance of the gateway? When you configure a gateway address, your Windows machine adds a default route statement to your machine's route table. The route table statement instructs your Windows computer to send any data packet that is destined for a different IP subnet to the default gateway address. The default gateway is actually an IP router that will route the data packet to the correct destination subnet.
The above configuration works nicely as long as there is only one gateway on your LAN. But suppose your LAN has multiple routers connecting to different remote locations. Consider a scenario where your user workstations must access some network resources via one gateway and other network resources via the other gateway. The figure below shows PC's on a LAN that has two different gateway routers. One router (Router #1) connects to the Internet and the other (Router #2) connects to other corporate locations via a Wide-Area Network (WAN).