Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Freerice.com

I'm a big fan of vocabulary use, and I'm a big fan of people not starving to death. Thus, I'm a very big fan of http://www.freerice.com. The project, run by the same folks that run http://www.poverty.com is the sort of thing that makes you wonder "why didn't I think of this?"

The crux of the site is a multiple choice vocabulary quiz--you'll be given a word and four choices for the definition, then asked to pick the correct one. For every word you correctly define, FreeRice will donate 10 grains of rice to the UN's End World Hunger campaign. Ten grains may not seem like much, but it adds up rather quickly; correctly define ten words, and you've donated a bowl of rice that will feed one person.


The game has 50 "levels," and dynamically scales as you progress; when you miss a few questions in a row, it dials itself back a difficulty level, and when you get a few questions right in a row, it bumps the difficulty up. According to the website, it is "very rare" for people to get past level 48. My current record stands at 46 47, so I urge you to go to the website and try to beat me (oh, and feed some people while you're at it).

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