Ending World Hunger with Vocab?

on Friday, April 10, 2009

What I discovered during the first semester of my senior year of high school, and subsequently donating countless hours to, is a website called FreeRice.com.

This site is a way to help feed the wold—one vocabulary word at a time! When visiting the site, you are prompted with a word and four possible meanings of that word. When you correctly answer one of these questions, the site, and its advertisers, will donate ten grains of rice.

A new feature that they have added onto the site has been the option to change the subject of the words. FreeRice used to just give the viewer English Vocabulary words and called it a day, but now they are allowing you to change the language of the vocab, specifically for studying the new languages and beginning vocabulary of Italian, French, German, and Spanish, along with the new options of being tested on geography, country capitals, chemical symbols, English grammar, and famous paintings.

What I found really helpful was that during the time that I came across this website, it was around SAT time and I was able to study vocab while still helping to contribute to the war on hunger.

There is an extensive variety of continuous tests on the site, so one can spend anywhere from five seconds to hours on FreeRice and still help to make a difference for the world. To date, FreeRice has been able to donate 62,622,922,890 grains of rice after starting on October 7, 2007.

FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program. They partner with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. This site has two goals, as taken from their website, to provide education to everyone for free and to help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

I took the opportunity of coming across this website and told my fall semester senior English class. My teacher was an extremely relaxed teacher at my high school, especially because this was a senior course and was seen as a blow-off class. While working in the computer lab on a paper, my teacher would let us only visit FreeRice on the Internet after finishing our projects and papers. It doesn't really seem as if FreeRice would be any fun whatsoever, but everyone in that class, which happened to be a hodgepodge of every group of seniors in my school, became quite attached to the little game and would spend all of our free time trying to get ten more grains of free rice.

I would definitely encourage anyone to check out this website, even for just a minute, it would really help and it is completely painless and actually beneficial to you and your vocabulary.

1 comments:

fly4jc said...

I am so glad that you decided to write about this. My mom actually will make me do this (yes she still makes me do things) over the summer when I have nothing else to do. I is seriously such an easy way to donate food while expanding vocabulary. I wondered if I would have done better on my SATs if I would have found freerice.com before then.

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