The Salt of the Earth One way or another, salt is going to get you. The confusion that reigns over the role of salt in our lives is enormous. This is difficult to explain since we know so much about what salt does. Salt is a compound that is made of the elements sodium and chlorine.
Sodium alone is a soft metal which reacts violently with water.
To form salt, the sodium has given up an electron to form positively charged sodium ions. Chlorine alone is a yellow gas. To form salt, the chlorine atom accepts an electron and becomes a negatively charged chloride ion. We have all seen salt. We know that the sodium and chloride ions which form salt have completely different physical and chemical properties than the metal and gas from which they were formed.