A cook decided to add salt to a pot of soup that was boiling on the stove. As soon as the salt was added the soup stopped boiling. Explain why this happened?

Answer 1

Adding the salt to the soup raised the boiling point of the water in the soup. This is a well known phenomena in thermodynamics that when you add a solute (especially one with a much higher boiling point than the solvent) to a solvent (which is water in this case) you will initially increase the temperature at which the resulting solution will boil - and incidentally also depress the temperature at which it will freeze.