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Vocabularice

By bioephemera on February 8, 2008.

I finally got around to visiting freerice.com, a vocabulary game that lets you "win" donations of rice for needy countries. (Yes, it's like the SAT, but some of us find that kind of thing fun.) The words start off easy, but ramp up to a pleasing level of difficulty; I played for about ten minutes and hovered around a score of 50, peaking at 52.

How does it work? Advertisers pay per click, and the rice is purchased (mostly in Pakistan and Japan) and distributed by the United Nations' World Food Program. This story describes how the program is helping refugees in Bangladesh; 20 grains of rice per word doesn't seem like much, but the quanta really do add up to something meaningful.

The site got some heavy media promotion in the fall, and an average of half a million people a day have clicked through since its launch in October. According to Freerice's data, donations peaked in December (almost 7 B grains), but January declined to November's levels (about 4.5 B grains). So this is a good time to see if we (and a few hundred thousand friends) can bump February's total back up! Of course, if anything remotely resembling the SAT makes you hyperventilate, a donation of $16 buys an entire sack of rice. If only expanding one's vocabulary were so easy.

Kudos to programmer John Breen for creating this uber-simple opportunity for altruism!

Tags
education
Frivolity
words

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I've heard of it on NPR a couple of months ago. I need to go and try my hand at this, even as English is a second language to me. Just for clicks...

Ah, I forgot all about that. I remember "donating" sacks of rice with a simple javascript hack that did the equivalent of clicking on the first choice every two seconds. Of course it only won one out of four that way.

The first time I played that game, I lost interest almost immediately because it was so easy-- I mean, none of the possible answers were similar enough to confuse somebody who actually knew the words! WHATEVER! I've reevaluated my contemptuous assessment, though, now that I've played it a bit more (at your urging, mind) and managed to get 6 out of 212 wrong! So I guess it's at least as hard as the SAT after all.