Free Rice 6 January, 2008 at 8:21 am
FreeRice is a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com.
FreeRice has two goals:
- Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
- Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.
How does FreeRice do this? The interactive part of the site is a vocabulary tester / game. Every time you get the word right, 20 grains of rice (not much, but over many words by many people, quite a bit!) is donated to the UN World Food Program. The difficulty of the words depends on what ‘level’ you are at – which goes down when you get a word wrong, and goes up when you get three right in a row. I tell you, it can be bloody frustrating! The idea is that you will be kept somewhere at the edge of your vocabulary – once you’ve seen the same words come up a bunch of times, you of course learn them (well, one would hope eventually!) and move on. You stumble back pretty quickly sometimes, and forward progress is slow, but it is also addictive!
I think the highest level I reached was 45. I’m not sure, exactly, as it was a while ago now (before New Year’s, certainly, maybe before Christmas) , but it didn’t often get past 43. See how you go, and help to feed the hungry.
Link: FreeRice.com
-G.
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