Free Rice and Free Vocabulary Quizzes

One of the reasons I started this blog was so that I would have a place to put a link to Free Rice, an inspiring website that went live back in October.

On the site, you're presented with a multiple choice vocabulary quiz. For every correct answer you come up with, the site will donate 20 grains of rice to the UN's World Food Program, which provides food where it's needed around the world, including to the refugee camps run by Doctors Without Borders.

Free Rice has been getting a lot of media attention and its donation numbers (in grains of rice) are reported on the site daily. The money to pay for the rice comes from very discreet advertisements along the bottom of the page.

The quiz works by trying out four or five words on you. If you get them all right, you get a score of 40. For each additional three words you get right, you go up a point, until you hit 50, which is the top score. If you get one wrong, however, you drop a point, so it is a case of three steps forward equals one step forward, one step backward equals one step backward... so it can be hard to advance!

The site's creator says that it is hard to score above about 45, and quite unusual to get above 48. My advice is that the more you do the quiz, the better you will do because you'll see some of the same words reused, and even though you didn't know them the first time, you start to remember them on subsequent quizzes. So I did manage to crack that top level, and hit 50 a few times, although I've never stayed there long, sometimes rapidly falling back six levels.

I can't exactly call this a hint, but let me just say, it helps to have taken French and Latin (Greek would be even better), and to read a lot of historical or fantasy fiction that uses archaic terminology from the days of knighthood. Knowing the Latin names of a lot of plants doesn't hurt either; campanulate means bell-shaped (like Campanula, the bellflower) and chelonic means turtle-like (as in the genus Chelone, common name: turtlehead. But all of a sudden around level 46 or 47 the words suddenly stop coming from Latin or Greek roots and become... I'm not sure what. Hence the difficulty level!

I like the Free Rice site for several reasons. Quite honestly, what got my attention about it first was how beautiful it looks. Then how simple it is to use. And of course, the fact that it is raising money for a good cause. It's an inspiration to all social justice causes about how to use the Web to raise awareness and money, while providing entertainment (and even education).

Check it out. Do something for your brain and for world hunger at the same time: www.freerice.com.