Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Big Words and Bags of Rice

I'm addicted to a vocabulary game. Well, not really a game per se, but it's a test with rewards. At Free Rice you test your vocabulary with multiple choice answers, and for every word you guess correctly, 10 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program. There's a bunch of corporate sponsors with banners on the bottom of the site, and they're the guys paying for all the rice.

The fun part, if there is such a person out there shares my stunted view of fun, is that for every word you get right the next word is harder. Until eventually you wish you a PhD in latin and biological taxonomy. There are 50 levels, and apprarently it's rare to hit 48. I got to 43 and I'm determined to get to 48. Without cheating, of course, because that would be not fun. By the way, when you get an answer wrong, you lose a level, but your donated rice grains stay the same.

So if you're looking for a time suck (generously known as procrastination), check out the test here and learn more about the program here, with a possible moral caveat here.

2 comments:

Ms. M&P said...

I had a midterm tonight and tried to spend most of the weekend studying. However, I spent a lot of time donating rice. I could consistently get tot level 38 without cheating, but after that I started to struggle. I'm aiming to get to 40 soon....It's addicting!!

PiggyBankBlues said...

yeah, i was stuck on 38 for a bit. i have to lay off of it, b/c it's definitely addicting!