Free Rice Website Feeds the Poor with Each Click

There’s a new trend in online fundraising, a simple way to manipulate the principle that advertising keeps a site running by paying to have ads displayed with each click.

A new website called Free Rice, launched in October 2007, uses this source of revenue to purchase rice for the United Nations World Food Program, to be distributed to impoverished people in the third world.

The concept is simple, but brilliant. A word vocabulary game, as addicting as solitaire or facebook scrabble, entices you to expand your knowledge while at the same time helping end world poverty. On the first screen, a word is presented, and four different options for synonyms are listed below. You simply choose the word from the list that means the same thing as the word in question, and the screen refreshes to tell you whether or not your answer is correct. A banner ad appears across the bottom, the revenue from which, if you’re answer is right, purchases 20 grains of rice for the World Food Program.

A wooden bowl on the right hand side appears to collect the grains of rice you’ve supplied, and the site keeps track of your totals by your IP address, keeping the data even when you come back again after several days.

I find this game highly addictive just for itself, aside from the fact that it’s also effectively redirecting money from capitalist America to the impoverished 3rd world. I’ve always found word games challenging and enjoyable, and this is no exception. There are fifty vocab difficulty levels, ranging from words to challenge a person new to the English language, to students, doctors, lawyers or saleswomen. Everyone needs a strong grasp on language to succeed in life, so Free Rice strengthens your comprehension skills by presenting you with words you’d never run across unless you were reading Dickens on a regular basis. I’m averaging around level 40 – when you answer a question wrong, your next word is at a lower vocab level; when you answer several correct, you jump up to a harder level. Sometimes you can guess a word’s meaning by its prefix or suffix, or a root word within it that you might recognize from another concept; in this way the game teaches you to understand the structure of our language as well as simply memorizing new individual words.