freerice.com - improve your vocabulary while saving lives
Apologies to Alex for breaking the chain of SEO-related posts, but…
As one of these irritating people who constantly claims to ‘love words’ (’words’ said in that horribly reverential way, as if somehow… Welsh), stumbling across this site not only gave me an opportunity to learn a few new ones, but also to help out those who are significantly worse off.
FreeRice.com gives you a word and 4 possible synonyms, and simply asks you to pick the one closest to the meaning. The simple way in which it works means that you will find your vocabulary increasing unconsciously; and what’s more, for every word you get right, they’ll donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. New words are constantly being added by ‘a team of professional lexicographers’, which sounds like a wonderful job.
20 grains of rice doesn’t sound that much, but over a few months you can really make a difference. Plus today I learned that a ‘bluestocking’ is another word for a ’scholarly woman’. Incredible.
But then again, I do love words. And we like charities.
So, why not do your bit? Even if it’s just a couple of words a day, you’ll be helping yourself and others, and you don’t even need to get your cheque book out. Win-win!
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John Bennet said,
April 29, 2008 @ 5:36 pm
Another great charity site is AIDtoCHILDREN.com. It donates money to children in need through World Vision.
AIDtoCHILDREN.com is a dual-purpose site for building an English vocabulary and raising money for under privileged children in the most impoverished places around the world.
Check it out at http://www.aidtochildren.com
Ranjan said,
May 9, 2008 @ 7:05 am
i’ve gone through this.
Is this site really providing food for orpahn and and poor children????
Dave said,
May 13, 2008 @ 1:32 pm
@Ranjan:
Your comment prompted me to do a bit of research (to be honest the idea that it was a scam had never occurred to me, since they’re not taking any of my money), and it seems that a site called dailycow.org has proved that freerice is a ’scam’ in that they don’t actually send as much rice as they claim - see blog entry @ http://dailycow.org/node/207 - but as also stated on dailycow, “at least FreeRice is doing SOMETHING!”.
They also admit that if the site admin is savvy enough to block bot activity on FreeRice, the results of their ‘investigation’ are pretty much null and void.
FreeRice.com does feature a video of one of their early rice consignments being sent out, so they are actively doing *something* for developing and under-developed nations, which, apart from clicking a few words a day, is more than I can say for myself!