Freerice: an ambitious goal

all pictures by Google images

Are you looking for an original way to assess the wideness of your vocabulary? And are you interested in helping poor people who have to fight against famine day after day? Strange but true, now you can combine this two interests of yours just with a click!!! Surfing the Net I ran into a very interesting website called FreeRice: it is a sort of quiz, in which you can choose among four options the correct definition of the word you read on the screen, but each time you give the right answer you donate a handful of grains of rice to the people living in the developing countries. I think it's a wonderful idea!!! I was afraid that it could be the umpteenth fraud, so I visited the website carefully and I discovered that this game is part of the United Nations World Food Program. FreeRice was launched just few months ago, in October 2007, but since then almost 20 billions of grains have already been donated to feed people from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Cambodia, Uganda and many other countries in which hunger is still a major problem. Please, take a moment to watch this video and understand the importance of this project!

Here are the answers to some of the questions you may have about FreeRice taken directly for the website:
"If FreeRice has the rice to give, why not give it all away right now?
FreeRice is not sitting on a pile of rice―you are earning it 20 grains at a time. Here is how it works. When you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people.
Does FreeRice make any money from this?
No, it does not. FreeRice runs the site at no profit.
Who distributes the donated rice?
The rice is distributed by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The World Food Program is the world’s largest food aid agency, working with over 1,000 other organizations in over 75 countries. In addition to providing food, the World Food Program helps hungry people to become self-reliant so that they escape hunger for good. Wherever possible, the World Food Program buys food locally to support local farmers and the local economy.

Will the rice I donate make a difference?
The rice you donate makes a huge difference to the person who receives it. According to the United Nations, about 25,000 people die each day from hunger or hunger-related causes, most of them children. To a mother or father watching a loved child die in their arms from hunger, the rice you donate is more precious than anything in the world."

And don't forget that learning new vocabulary can have inimaginable benefits for us who are supposed to use languages for our job as well!!! So what can I say? Have fun saving people, but watch out: words are not so easy as you may think...:-D