Hey Nerds!
Last year, in introductory english comp, I remember sitting next to a guy who NEVER paid attention in class. He spent the entire period searching the web for new, entertaining things to cure his boredom. Usually, his prescription was youtube videos or online games, but one day he came across FreeRice.com, and it spread through the school like wildfire.
The concept is simple: if you play their free online vocabulary games, then for every question you answer correctly, 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN to feed starving countries. Cool huh? Seems like a win-win situation. You get to expand your mind, and starving people get to eat.
It’s actually a little more complicated than that… but that basic concept is still the same. You still are required to play the game (which is free and doesn’t need you to enter email addresses or anything), but neither the money nor the rice actually come from FreeRice.com. FreeRice has an agreement with numerous sponsors, who trade money for food in exchange for advertising space. When people play the game, ads are shown. But there’s a twist: ads only show up when you answer a question CORRECTLY. For every correct answer, an ad is shown, and the sponsor donates the money for 10 grains of rice to the UN.
This all costs you NOTHING… well, except for internet costs…
So far, this simple method has donated almost 70 BILLION grains of rice to countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Uganda – among others. In fact there were exactly 24,830,100 grains donated just yesterday (Oct 25). And the numbers are still growing!!
Since the site launched in 2007, there have been a few improvements. Now, you can keep track of exactly how much rice you’re responsible for donating, you can have words pronounced for you, and you can choose from a variety of subjects ranging from french vocabulary (my personal favorite) to symbols of the periodic table!!
To wrap all of this humanitarian goodness up, FreeRice is COMPLETELY NON-PROFIT. Absolutely no money goes into the pockets of the programmers in exchange for their countless hours of coding and updating. It just doesn’t get better than that.
So head on over to FreeRice.com and beat my score. Currently: 950 grains of rice.
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Best of Luck,
Grey
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PS. If you really want to participate, but you simply don’t have the time to play the game, you can make a direct monetary donation to the cause by clicking here. THANKS!
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