FreeRice.com: Improve Your Vocabulary, Feed Hungry People

When you’re bored – or avoiding work – it’s easy to get sucked in to reading gossip, playing games, and mindlessly surfing the internet. But, you can fritter away your time, improve your vocabulary and, amazingly enough, send rice to starving people all over the world instead. The website FreeRice.com donates 20 grains of rice for every vocabulary question you gaet right to the UN World Food Program.

From the FreeRice website:

Do I really make a difference by playing FreeRice?

The rice you donate makes a huge difference to the person who receives it. According to the United Nations, about 25,000 people die each day from hunger or hunger-related causes, most of them children. Though 20 grains of rice may seem like a small amount, it is important to remember that while you are playing, so are thousands of other people at the same time. It is everyone together that makes the difference. Thanks to you, FreeRice has generated enough rice to feed more than two million people since it started in October 2007.

The rice is paid for by the sponsors whose names you see on the bottom of your screen when you enter a correct answer. These sponsors support both learning (free education for everyone) and reducing hunger (free rice for the hungry). We thank these sponsors for their generous participation at FreeRice. For information about how you or your company can sponsor FreeRice, please email freerice.rep@wfp.org.

Give it a try! It’s really addictive. In getting sucked into Free Rice I’ve noticed that words do tend to repeat a bit too often, and as a former English major I find a lot of the words insultingly easy, but there’s a good mix of appropriately obscure words thrown in.

In addition to vocabulary, you can change subjects to instead answer questions about famous paintings, chemical symbols, geography, language learning and even math. Give your brain a workout and help Free Rice feed the hungry – it’s a win-win.

Link [FreeRice.com]

More Criticism for Ethanol: Now it’s Affecting Food Prices

Those who have looked to corn as the next great biofuel better be prepared for a new barrage of criticism. Missouri is currently seeing an uprising against its measures supporting ethanol production, because using corn for fuel means there’s less for food – both for people and for livestock. That means skyrocketing prices in an already damaged economy.

Reuters has it:

St. Onge said the committee is studying a measure that would roll back the mandate and is still determining whether to push any action before the end of Missouri’s legislative session next month.

The moves in Missouri come as Texas Gov. Rick Perry is asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for a 50 percent waiver of the mandate for grain-based ethanol production.

Pilgrim’s Pride Corp and Tyson Foods issued statements over the weekend supporting Perry’s request, saying “unprecedented increases for corn and soybean meal” would add billions of dollars of cost to the food industry this year.

The cons of ethanol are piling up with no signs of stopping. Stephen Pizzo of AlterNet said it well:

Is turning food into fuel as millions starve to death really the ethical answer to our oil addiction? If the ethanol folks have their way and Detroit starts cranking out E85 cars by the millions, how are you going to feel when you have to buy one. How will you feel filling up your car with food-juice during the day and then watching starving children on the evening news as some horse’s ass in Washington pontificates about how the world needs to do something about that? How will you feel?

Time to throw in the towel here, folks. It ain’t going to work. When it comes right down to it, it’s doubtful that ethanol will be any better for the earth than oil, and we’ll all be better off in the end if they stop funneling money into a useless cause. There are so many other options out there.

Link [Reuters] + [Alternet]
Photo: Wikimedia Commons