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.
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 Ricenow and see if you can feed someone a bowl of rice on your own lunchbreak.
