Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Help to End World Hunger


Last week, while reading the newspaper, I read about an online trivia game that for every question answered correctly you earned so many grains of free rice, which went to ending world hunger. This morning I went looking for the article so I could refer to it. Of course I couldn’t find it so resorted to the ever reliable Google and googled “online trivia game having to do with rice.” Google rarely lets me down and within the blink of an eye Freerice popped up. It only took me a few seconds to realize I’d hit paydirt.

Freerice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Programme and was founded in October 2007 by John Breen, an American computer programmer. “In March 2009, Mr. Breen donated the site to the United Nations World Food Programme. In making the donation, Mr. Breen expressed his hopes that Freerice will be able to grow over the coming years, helping to feed and educate as many people as possible throughout the world.”

Freerice has two goals:
• Provide education to everyone for free.
• Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

For each answer you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated through the World Food Programme to help end hunger. The more questions you answer correctly the more grains of rice you earn. Currently, there are six topics to choose from with differing levels of difficulty:

Art
Famous Paintings

Chemistry
Chemistry symbols (Basic)
Chemical Symbols (Full List)

Language Learning
French
German
Italian
Spanish

English
English Vocabulary
English Grammar

Geography
Identify Countries on the Map
World Capitals

Math
Basic Math (Pre-Algebra)
Multiplication Table

“Freerice is the sister site of Poverty.com, which also launched in 2007 with a counter showing one person dying of hunger every 2.5 seconds. Breen is no stranger to such programs, having created The Hunger Site in June 1999.” (quote from Snopes.com)

The rice is paid for by the sponsors whose names you see on the bottom of the screen when you enter a correct answer. These sponsors support both learning (free education for everyone) and reducing hunger (free rice for the hungry).

Freerice does not make any money from this. It is a website committed to the cause of ending hunger around the world and is run entirely for free and at no profit. All money (100%) raised by the site goes to the United Nations World Food Programme to help feed the hungry. Sponsors make all payments to the World Food Programme directly.

Please check out http://www.freerice.com/, have some fun, maybe learn something new or test your knowledge and help end world hunger with the right answer and a click.

Namaste
Chris

P.S. Unless otherwise noted, much of the information and quotes for this post came from the Freerice website’s FAQ section where you’ll find much more information about this worthwhile endeavor.

4 comments:

SE'LAH... said...

Thanks for sharing this Chris. I've always wondered however, why does it take us doing online trivia for these organisations to donate to the poor. I am thankful that they do however...and therefore, will participate.

one love.

Jaime said...

I'm going to have to check this out. Thanks for sharing!
Good to see you here again...I feel like I was here not too long ago, and there was no sign of you...now, all of a sudden, there is a burst of new posts!
Welcome back :)

Lyn said...

So good that you blogged about this. I stumbled across that site several months ago and I confess, it was addictive. I think I actually picked up some interesting factoids as well in the process. Every little bit helps!

Birdie said...

CHris, but that is so nice to share. I'll go and check and participate!
You are such a lovely person!! big hugs!