Freerice is a site owned by the UN World Food Programme, where you answer various educational, multiple-choice questions in order to combat world hunger. For every question you answer correctly, the programme will donate 10 grains of rice to feed a person in a poor country such as Bangladesh, Uganda or Cambodia (though Freerice donates to many countries all over the world).

The questions are very quick and easy – literally one click to answer a short question and it’s onto the next one – and you can choose from a variety of topics and difficulty levels to answer questions on; anything from easy questions on world geography to intermediate French vocab.

As of January 2011, an amazing 85 million grains of rice have been donated through this initiative – make your contribution to Freerice here.

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THE HUNGER SITE. This is one habit that could become a year-round activity. Go to the Hunger Site at http://www.thehungersite.com click on the “Click Here to Give! It’s Free!” button and you send food to the poor around the world, courtesy of the sponsors. The page it goes to will also offer you some unusual gift items from around the world worth the visit alone. Tabs at the top will also take you to similar sites benefitting breast cancer, child literacy, abandoned pets, and the rainforest. Here’s the neat thing: you can sign up for a daily reminder which contains a link that will open the site in a new window and keep you from forgetting to check in. For the vocabulary-building-gamester, try Free Rice at http://www.freerice.com/. Here you are presented a series of unusual words and a choice of four definitions. For each right answer, the sponsors donate 10 grains of rice. Play daily, rack up a good score, discover words you’ve never heard of before and some, thank goodness, that are a little familiar. Obviously it’s a numbers game…the more who participate and do sooften, the more is raised. Spread the word.

USE FOOD COUPONS TO FEED THE NEEDY. Think of this as a hobby, another one that can be worked at Christmas or year-round. At no cost to yourself except for the time which you would normally expend on any other less rewarding hobby, you can gather coupons for a shopping spree. When you finish shopping you’ll have a large amount of food at a ridiculously low price which can be dropped at the local food pantry. The trick is to remember that coupons are just the first stage in promoting a product. Hold the coupons for about a month then go in and take advantage of the second stage, price reduction at the shelf. Buy then using your coupons for a deep discount. If there’s a double coupon value day available or a senior discount day (take your mom or grandma and let her make the purchase), by all means take advantage of that. For chump change and some time clipping coupons and checking online coupon sites while watching TV, you get to be a hero.

CHRISTMAS CHANGE. If you haven’t started emptying your pockets each day into a change jar, Christmas is a perfect time. Set it aside not for a personal extravagance or to pay bills, but for donations. Either you’re already giving a lot of money by attending chili dinners and buying raffle tickets or making outright cash donations (in which case you can set aside change for such things painlessly in this way) or you are not doing any of that and it’s about time you start Cash in around Christmas, although you can do it at any time during the year if you wish. Make it a game. You can even start several jars. One for something you really need for yourself, one for Christmas giving, and one for everyday giving. Just for kicks, stick a dollar bill in a book on your bookshelf every once in awhile and forget about it until it’s time to make your donations. Good for your karma. Incidentally, don’t overlook the Christmas Club account as a way of getting the cash out of your reach. This is also where you can dump your Chirstmas change jar accumulation every month or so.

FREE MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR THE LIBRARY. A few magazines disappeared from the Nashville (IL) Public Library because of a tightening budget. I had a few online survey sites which offered items as rewards that didn’t appeal to me, but they did offer magazines. So, I have signed them up for a number of subscriptions. The librarian even has her husband saving Coke Rewards points towards magazine subscriptions. The magazine rack is overflowing and this maneuver has saved the library $200-$300 by estimation. If you have some points you’ve built up with one or two survey sites, go ahead and offer the library a welcome Christmas present…a free magazine subscription. Or two. Or five.

1. Use both sides of your paper. Billions of trees are cut down each and every year to supply the demand from workplaces, so don’t be wasteful.

2. Buy local and fair trade produce whenever you can.

Image via Wikipedia

3. Put your name to an online petition for a cause you believe in.

4. Recycle your glasses, mobile phones and computers so they don’t end up in landfill.

5. Visit http://www.freerice.com/ to help feed hungry people (while giving your brain a work-out). For every answer you get right they’ll donate 10 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program.

Image via Wikipedia

6. Decline plastic bags. Invest in re-usable shopping bags instead and don’t let them gather dust!

7. Write or send a care package to a soldier stationed overseas. Visit http://www.penpalsforsoldiers.org/ to find out how.

8. Turn ALL appliances off at the switch whenever you aren’t using them.

9. Learn First-Aid. You never know when those skills may be needed.

10. Introduce yourself to an elderly person living in your block and have a chat with them.

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.

Some new features have been added in the last couple of months. There is now a feature that lets you hear an audio clip of the word in question, in case hearing its pronunciation helps you to better guess its meaning. The site also states that there is a team of specialists adding new words all the time, from some of the most difficult, obsure in the language, to many many more useful mid-level words, so that you’ll never run out of new vocabulary to learn.

Social aid activists have criticized the site for making us feel like we’re helping to end poverty in a fun and convenient way, placating us into feeling like we’ve done our part and can now go spend our dough and continue to guiltlessly fuel the capitalist machine. They argue that the feeling of having donated rice to a hungry refugee in Bangledesh with such minimal effort, distracts us from other, possibly more effective aid strategies, such as putting pressure on our governments to send aid, reexamine trade embargos, or enforce human rights standards, volunteering with NGOs or simply learning about the issues and living our lives in a less wasteful way. There certainly is some truth to that criticism, and we must keep it in mind and always strive to fight injustice in as many ways as possible. However, most of the north American population whiles away at least several minutes browsing the internet at some point in their day, so why not make those few minutes count for something?

Visit Free Rice now and see if you can feed someone a bowl of rice on your own lunchbreak.

Playing this game is very easy. You are given an English word, and you have to answer the synonym of it from the four given choices. At first the questions are very simple. The difficulty increases with every correct answer. You score 10 rice grains for every right answer and the total rice grains scored are donated to hungry people by the sponsors who advertise on this site. Many famous International companies like Toshiba, Apple etc. had come forward to advertise on this site. They donate the required income earned through the advertisements to WFP (World Food Program) to feed the hungry people.

Many people are enjoying this game two-fold: one for improving their English vocabulary and another for feeding the hungry people. Why late? Taste the free rice today.