In a fish and chips shop, the potatoes are cut hours before they are cooked, but they must not dry out. To stop this, the owner soaks them in a salt solution. Define the process of osmosis and explain what would happen if you used distilled water.

Osmosis can be described as the movement of water from a high concentration to a low concentration through a semi permeable membrane.In this example the salt solution has roughly the same concentration of water, therefore there is no net movement of water, thus the pre-cooked chips remain the same. However, if there was distilled water without any solute dissolved, the concentration of water is much higher outside the chip, than within, thus water moves into the chip causing it to swell. Resulting in a poor tasting chip.