FreeRice

Written By: - Date published: 11:53 am, October 23rd, 2007 - 5 comments
Categories: interweb - Tags:

FreeRice is a vocabulary game. For each word you correctly identify, they’ll donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger.

We are not sitting on a pile of riceâ€â€¢you are earning it 10 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.

The site launched on the 7th of October. They’ve donated 137,769,030 grains of rice so far.

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5 comments on “FreeRice ”

  1. Sam Dixon 1

    Good fun and worth cause of course but have to say it would hilarious if the counter went backwards when you got one worng – I picture Readers’ Digest going to starving African villages and demanding their rice.

  2. Nih 2

    I’ve seen more effective ways of raising money for charity.

  3. Phil 3

    Saving the world AND enriching your vocabulary in a lunch break… two thumbs waaaay up from me

  4. Sam Dixon 4

    Yeah, turns out there are 50,000 grains in a kg of rice, so you need to answer about 1,000 questions to feed someone for a meal (200g of rice). And the 3 tons so far would have cost the donees about $1000, probably less as they’ll be sourced in the third world.

    Also, if you’re answering 10 questions a minute you’re giving at a rate of 100g an hour, which is going to be worth a few cents – even National wouldn’t have returns for labour that low.

    They could have made it 100 grains an answer at least 🙂

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