That’s just my score for one session. Overall, it’s one billion grains and counting.
FreeRice is a recent website that is donating rice to the United Nations World Food Program with a multiple-choice vocabulary quiz. For every correct answer FreeRice will give 10 grains of rice. You watch your bowl fill up as you progress and if you get one wrong, you’ll learn the definition and you can continue to play and to help the hungry — and increase your vocabulary. (The second stated goal of this site is to provide free English vocabulary to everyone.)
Yesterday alone, 77,126,310 grains of rice were donated; compare that with 830 grains on October 7, the day the site debuted. Since it began, 1,008,771,910 grains have gone to the world’s hungry.
The rice is paid for by the sponsors’ ads, including Macy’s, AMEX and computer companies, which appear during the quizzes. In this way, the corporations are supporting learning as well as ending hunger. Nobody loses here.
FreeRice is a sister site of Poverty.com, which not only tracks deaths from hunger (about 1,000 per hour) but also shows us their names, faces and countries. These are real people, many of them children.
Please go play the game as often as you wish. You might discover, as I did, there are words you forgot you know. A new word to me is the one that tripped me up, grimalkin. It means an elderly female cat. Now I know.
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What a great site! I hadn’t heard of FreeRice before, but I just popped over and donated 850 grains of rice. I’ll definitely try and do 1,000 grains a day if I can.
It’d be good if schools could use it, get their students to take the quiz for twenty minutes each day; they’d be improving their vocabulary and feel like they’re doing something to help. If even just a fraction of schools did it, that would be millions of grains a day.
I’ll post a link on my blog too. I got up to level 48 in difficulty, but was tripped up by caoutchouc; apparently it’s a kind of rubber.
Thanks, cj! I’ve been popping over there when my brain’s on overload and I need to clear the decks. A billion grains in one month is amazing.
Not only would it be great for schools but one example given on the site, with respect to education and providing English vocabulary for free, is the ability for children and adults in poor villages worldwide to improve their English. As a longtime literacy volunteer, I’m all for that.
Caoutchouc? That’s a new one on me. Think you can use it in a poem?
A very nice find.
I’ve not had a chance to play too much yet, but I will definitely later.
You’re a sweetie, Cat. Thank you.