Free Rice for hungry people

[Lisabob 13]

Not directly scouting-related, but as this is Thanksgiving week, I am thankful that I, my family, friends, colleagues and neighbors, have enough good food to eat. And along those lines, have you heard of this cool way to help provide food to the world's neediest people, administered by the United Nations World Food Program? The idea is that you answer vocab questions and for every question you get right, you have "donated" 10 grains of rice. (The rice is actually paid for by the ads on the bottom of the screen)

 

Here's a link to the FreeRice FAQ: http://www.freerice.com/faq.html

 

And here's a link to the "game:" http://www.freerice.com/index.php

 

This program has been running just since early October and has already donated 2,457,120,420 grains of rice. It has been noted in major newspapers like the Washington Post and the BBC news channel.

 

Cool, huh? Might be a fun thing to share with your scouts this week.

 

 

[Gold Winger 9]

I got up to level 47 then I started missing words. I thought that I had a good vocabulary but they were throwing out words that I'd never heard.

[frank10 12]

Also a lot of British slang thrown in at the higher levels.

[Gold Winger 9]

I didn't notice slang, just words that Americans don't use very often.

 

An extensive vocabulary is frowned upon in this country. Most people consider you "high falutin'" when you use words that they don't know. A magazine editor once told me that most periodicals are written at a sixth grade level.

 

Real world example. I was in a store the other day and I heard a teenager ask his mother "what does intermediate mean?" His mother explained that it meant that the item went in between two others. The boy asked, "Why don't they just say 'this one goes between two others?"

[Joni4TA 10]

I wonder how many people 2,457,120,420 grains of rice will feed!

This is cool.

[Lisabob 13]

Scary you should ask that Joni. So my son and I had this same question and we're ah, a little concrete sequential from time to time. Consequently we measured out an 1/8 of a cup of uncooked basmati rice and counted. It comes to this: one cup of uncooked basmati is approximately 10,000 grains! Phew! Now THAT'S a lot of rice!

 

But lest that leaves anyone feeling badly, think of it this way: a cup of rice, when cooked, could be a meal for three-five people (depending on how large the portions are and admittedly, it would be better to have something to go with that rice). But it could very easily be the only meal people in some poverty-stricken areas of the world get in a day. And it takes relatively little effort to accumulate that much rice on this site.

 

And if we all accumulate some rice, well, 2 billion grains (plus some) have been donated in the last 6 weeks. 2 billion grains is about 200,000 cups of rice. And if each of those cups feeds 3-5 people one meal each, then all together, this project has provided somewhere between 600,000 to 1 million meals of rice to hungry people in just 6 weeks! Wow! Now that is, indeed, a lot of rice!

[Joni4TA 10]

I had regular old white rice tonight and it was pretty filling. I used about 2 cups uncooked and it fed my family of five. 10,000 plus grains? No wonder I am full!

[Trevorum 24]

Thanks for the link, LB, and also for the quantification.

 

A sublime example of: "Think globally, act locally"