Free Rice

The twin goals of the web game Free Rice are

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.
   

Here's how it works: for every word you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated by the web site's advertisers. The rice is distributed via the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The computer program tracks your vocabulary level and adjusts the difficulty of the words it asks you; the highest level is 50, although and we at nHumanities only managed to get to 47 50! (We tried again.)

When the web site started on October 7, it generated only 830 grains of rice, but yesterday--November 10--it generated 122,377,240 grains. A look at the web site's total page is the perfect illustration of what we mean by a viral website.

Thanks to Nancy Fees for pointing us to this web site!