When you stern in two cups of sugar into one cup of water you end with less than three cups of maple suyrupwhy?
First of all, this is not how maple syrup is made. Maple syrup
is the sap of maple trees, boiled down. The recipe here is for a
simple, basic syrup.
Second, to understand why two cups of one substance plus one cup
of a different substance does not equal three cups of combined
substance, let us look at a radically different but vaguely similar
example. Take a full crate of oranges. Now pour in several cups of
raisins. The raisins are smaller than the oranges, and so fill the
empty spaces between the oranges. Back to your question, here we
have water filling the gaps between the grains of sugar.
Thus when you stir in two cups of sugar into one cup of water,
the substances mix together to create syrup, which is much thicker
and denser than water or sugar separately. A substance is less
dense when a smaller amount of it takes up more space, and is more
dense when a greater amount of it takes up less space. This is why
you end up with less than three cups of syrup.