Free Rice Website Supports the UN World Food Programme

The United Nations World Food Programme is one of the world's foremost efforts providing food for people in famine situations. One of their most innovative ideas to help raise funds for their work is the website, FreeRice.com.

Quite a number of charities are now using an advertiser sponsored technique that allows "clicks per page" to translate into advertising dollars. The revenue is then used for the charity in question. FreeRice.com uses a similar concept with a game that pledges ten grains of rice for each correct vocabulary answer.

Each question is posed with a word and several multiple choice options. The level of difficulty begins at Level One with words that elementary school students would know, such as 'courage' or 'bug'. It reaches up to Level Sixty, which features words such as 'weasand' and 'sheugh' (Um...I have no idea...)

It is rather addictive -- I answered one hundred questions in what seemed like just a few minutes, proudly earning one thousand grains of rice for the hungry, just by knowing what words meant! I have to confess that as I rose through level-dom, I made mistakes — such as thinking that 'rathe' meant 'angry'. Silly me. But when I persevered, they gave me a chance to define it again and I remembered that it meant 'early'. So if you have one of those 'Jeopardy' brains and can remember the right answer, you're cooking with gas. Or rice.

Anyway, it is a really easy and painless way to do some good deed doing. If you don't have time to answer vocabulary questions you can do what we do and pledge a dollar amount each month directly to the UN World Food Programme website.

The website Charity Navigator gives the UN World Food Programme its highest rating, which is FOUR STARS.

The following quote is from the "About" page on FreeRice.com:

FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Programme.

FreeRice has two goals:    

* Provide education to everyone for free.
* Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the generosity of the sponsors who advertise on this site.

Whether you are [a] CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your education can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.

Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide.

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