In 2007 a few exciting things happened:
- The writers guild of America went on strike, effectively killing Firefly (and simultaneously ripping my heart out of my chest).
- The final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathy Hallows, was released.
- Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU.
- And, finally, my high school decided to give laptops to all the students.
Now, of course these laptops were given to us in an attempt to raise grades and, by proxy, standardized test scores; but in reality we all used them for watching YouTube videos of cats and reading fan fiction. The only exception was a particular website that hosted one very simple game – a game we would play through math, and lunch, and when we were faking a stomach ache to get out of gym… and that website was www.Freerice.com
Free Rice has users answer basic vocabulary questions (though they’ve incorporated other subjects since its creation) for a total of 10 grains of rice donated for every correct answer.
And there have been a lot of correct answers! Over the course of its seven years Freerice.com has donated 100,560,671,426 grains of rice – that’s over 4,424,722 pounds!
According to their website, 400 grams of rice is the typical donation per person per day (enough for two meals) and it takes 48 grains to make one gram.
Let’s do some math!
100,560, 671, 426 grains divided by 48 equals 2095013988.04 grams… divided by 400 grams per person…round to the nearest human…
5,237,535 people who were able to receive vital and extraordinarily necessary sustenance as we accidently taught ourselves SAT words all while avoiding English like the plague? I like those numbers!
Free Rice is a part of the World Food Program (a subsidiary of the UN and similar to UNICEF) whose primary goal is to help ensure that the poorest people in the world, mainly women and children, have enough calories to survive. Something I certainly take for granted as I sip my vanilla latte.
And for those of you who are raising the UN alarm hold on-
“…the organization receives no dues or portions of the UN assessed contributions.”
– WFP, http://www.wfp.org/about/funding
The WFP’s budget is made up of voluntary government, corporate and private donations. The US donated over 1 billion dollars between governmental aid and private contributions in 2012. Meanwhile, Freerice.com is sponsored by people who place an emphasis on learning. Every time a question is answered correctly, these sponsors will donate money so WFP can buy rice which they try, whenever possible, to buy locally to help the community’s economy as well as cut expenses, ultimately letting them buy more rice.
But really, what it all boils down to (get it? Boils?) is that every time you answer 40 questions correctly you give a person enough food to survive another day- and you save your IQ a bit, too.
-Dana
Click to play
Sources:
http://www.wfp.org/about/funding
http://freerice.com/frmisc/totals
http://freerice.com/about/faq
http://www.wfp.org/about/funding/year/2012