A drop of water in a tin of sugar: Which one's the solvent, the sugar or the water? The other day, when we were dealing with the chapter Solutions, our teacher asked us this:


  If I add a drop of water, to a tin full of sugar (without mixing it in), what's the solvent here? The water or the sugar?


Naturally we were taken aback by the 'unorthodox' nature of the question. Seeing that none of us were in a position to answer that any time soon, he gave us the "answer":


  It's the sugar. If you remember the definition we learnt ( solute + solvent = solution; between the solute and the solvent, the solvent is one present in a larger quantity and is in the same phase/state of matter as the solution ) you ought to have realized that, since there's more sugar than water, and at the end of the process the tin's filled with a solid.


Now that may seem like a clever way of testing our command of terminologies and definitions, but I saw a hitch there.

A solution is defined as a homogeneous mixture.

Adding a drop of water to a tin of sugar (without mixing it in) does not result in a homogeneous mixture. So as interesting as the question is, I feel it's flawed on this account... because what we're dealing with isn't technically even a solution.

Now I told this to my teacher, but he (quite deftly) side-stepped my query...a subtle way of indicating that he's not comfortable discussing this. 

So I guess my question here boils down to this:

Was my teacher's "answer" correct? Or was the question seriously flawed to begin with?



EDIT-

I wouldn't call this a duplicate. Sure, I mean, both my question and the other one that was linked with this was about identifying the solvent and solute but I feel my question is distinct because:

1) It isn't answered well enough in the other question (that answer was too generalized... I've given a specific instance here)

2) I also want to know if a drop of water added to a tin full of sugar (without mixing it) can be considered a solution.
You could imagine stirring the sugar enough for the water molecules to be uniformly distributed throughout - it would then be homogeneous.  

However, even then, to refer to the mixture as a solution of water in sugar is unhelpful, not least because referring to a slightly damp solid as a solution will only confuse.  A definition needs to be useful, as well as being a set of criteria to be met.

Consider adding more water, and stirring till uniformly distributed.  At some point, the mixture will become a thick syrupy liquid.  Add yet more, and it will eventually resemble an ordinary solution.  At what arbitrary point do you say one is a solution of the other?

As a device to get students thinking about the interactions that take place when a solid dissolves in a liquid, or a liquid in another liquid, it's an excellent question, but not one that has either a right or a wrong answer, other than "neither", or indeed "both".

What is definitely wrong is to insist that there's only one right answer to the question.