When heated, air expands. Now when you take the tupperware out of the microwave and it cools down, the air inside cools down again and contracts, and 'sucks' the lid inwards.
Actually, that's not quite right - it's more precise to say the air outside presses the lid shut. The bodies of air outside and inside seek to equalize their pressure, and normally the tupperware would just shrink / contract until it's inside pressure is equal to the room pressure. But since the container is somewhat rigid, it can't shrink enough and there remains a pressure difference. This causes a force acting on the lid, keeping it shut.
So:
cooling down => volume shrinks
cooling down, but forcing the volume to be constant => pressure goes down
inequal pressure => force towards the lower pressure
Good question. The rate of temperature increase scales as the power absorbed by the food divided by mass of the food. So to understand your question, you need to understand how power is absorbed.
There is a finite amount of power in the microwaves being produced. These microwaves bounce around in the metal cage where you put your food, until they come into contact with the food. (Well, some of them will get absorbed in the metal by imperfect reflection, but let's ignore that at first.) Once they get absorbed by the food, they turn into heat. Because they bounce around until they hit some food, the efficiency of a microwave is pretty high, in the sense that most of the power generated in the form of microwaves goes into heating the food, regardless of how much food you have.
So, at lowest-order, increasing the mass will increase the amount of water, but won't increase the amount of power being absorbed by the food. But now, that thing about absorption by the metal comes in. The power absorption will be slightly greater with a lot of food, since the food will be more likely to absorb the microwave before it gets absorbed by the metal. This is a lower-order effect, but it's there.
Of course, then the issue of skin depth comes in. Microwaves only penetrate a certain distance into the food. (Of order an inch, depending on the food.) So increasing the mass isn't really what you want; you want to increase the mass that's within the skin depth. For example, a wide dish of water that's one inch deep will absorb better than a jug of water with the same volume. This is why you want to split apart chicken breasts when defrosting them, for example.
To answer your question, then, the more food you put in, the more efficiently your food will capture the power being produced by the microwave oven. So you will capture the microwave's power better, but you will still heat slower because you have more mass. But this is not a dominant effect, and you might be better off redistributing your food to maximize the surface area.
Best Answer
What makes your microwave "better" than a stove at heating things is that is rather efficient at getting the heat into your food - the wave field permeates the food and resonates with dielectric molecules, which then distribute their rotational energy to their surroundings as heat. This does not rely greatly on heat conductivity inside the food since it is heated locally.
On a stove, all the heat comes from the burner below and somehow has to get to your food - first by transfer from the hot gas/plate to the vessel, and then from that vessel to food. This process is highly inefficient for food that is not in good thermal contact with the vessel - you get a very hot pot and warm air in the room. For water or your soup on the other hand, the thermal contact with the vessel is excellent and almost all the heat that is transferred to the vessel actually ends up in your food.
In the end, the fact that the times for microwave and stovetop heating come out close is mainly an artifact of the fact that your stove outputs much more power than the microwave - a 9000 BTU/hr burner is equivalent to about 2.6 kW, while your usual microwave outputs less than half of that) , but is a lot less efficient. For non-liquid foods, the stove is even less efficient while the efficiency of the microwave doesn't change much.