How would you like to study for your SATs, or just improve your vocabulary while also fighting world hunger? Well that’s exactly what FreeRice.com does. I’m passionate about social justice, and I love this website for its mission and clever idea…
It works like this:
You’re given a vocabulary question, such as:
watchman means:
You click on the right answer, and if you get it right, you get a harder question. But here’s the greatest part: for every question you get right, FreeRice donates 10 grains of rice through the World Food Programme to help end hunger.
Have you ever had a better reason to work on your vocabulary? As you keep getting correct answers, the questions gradually get more challenging, and if you get it wrong, you’re given the answer so you can learn for next time. If it’s too easy, you can change the level right away, or if it gets too hard and you just want to relax, you can go down a few levels. You can even choose to learn other subjects besides English vocabulary, such as Biology and Art History! To keep you motivated, you’re shown a wooden bowl on the left side of your screen, and it gradually fills with rice as you answer questions correctly. When you fill entire bowls, it displays “100 grains of rice” icons: you can visually see the meals you are providing just adding up! You don’t even have to sign up for anything, just click away.
In case you’re still not sold, read these facts posted on FreeRice:
-All money (100%) raised by the site goes to the UN World Food Programme to help feed the hungry. Sponsors make all payments to the WFP directly.
-Examples of where Freerice rice has been distributed:
- In Bangladesh, to feed 27,000 refugees from Myanmar for two weeks.
- In Cambodia, to provide take-home rations of four kilograms of rice for two months to 13,500 pregnant and nursing women.
- In Uganda, to feed 66,000 school children for a week.
- In Nepal, to feed over 108,000 Bhutanese refugees for three days.
- In Bhutan, to feed 41,000 children for 8 days.
- In Myanmar, to feed 750,000 cyclone affected people for 3 days.
Thus, whether you have thirty seconds or half an hour, click here and help end hunger now!
I remember this website! I was completely addicted. However, my teacher raised a good point, "How do you know that the rice and aid actually reaches the country?"…However, despite the dapper comment, I played hours on end anyways, believing in the good will of humanity =)
Great article!
I was worried about that too! But if you check out their FAQs and such it seems pretty credible. And either way, you don't lose anything by playing! It's not like an online donation site, where you're being scammed for your money. I think sometimes we get too paranoid about whether websites are trustworthy or not. I mean, we know youthareawesome is legitimate, but how do other people know that? We have no "certificates of authenticity" or whatever, and those sometimes just make things look suspicious.