Help End World Hunger with Freerice.com
Freedictionary.com defines hunger as "A strong desire or need for food;The discomfort, weakness, or pain caused by a prolonged lack of food;A strong desire or craving". It is a sad definition to think about, but unfortunately far too many people have to suffer through the pain of extreme hunger everyday. I have recently discovered a great website that is fun for users and is striving to end world hunger.
How can I help?
It is not hard to tell that world hunger is a horrible problem that many human beings have to face every single day. Anyone that is lucky enough to have more food than they need, should be willing to help those who aren't so fortunate. However, it is hard to get food to the starving on your own. Luckily there is a great site that helps you help those that need it the most.
Freerice.com is a non-profit website that is run by the United Nations World Food Program. The site shares its 2 main goals with users as being "To provide education to everyone for free" and " To help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free".
How Does the Site Work?
The concept behind Freerice is amazing, in my opinion. They provide trivia on a wide variety of topics that you get to choose. There are categories for English, Math. Foreign Languages, Humanities, Geography, and Science. There are many ways you can benefit from answering their trivia including:
- Answering Questions in the "Spanish" category to tighten up your Spanish speaking skills.
- If you are a math teacher, you could have your students answer multiplication facts. This can help them in math and teach them the importance of giving.
- Answer grammar questions to improve on your online writing skills.
- Use the chemistry category to study for your chemistry midterm.
- See how well you really know a subject by seeing what level you can make it to while answering. When selecting a new category they will begin by giving you easy questions that gradually get harder as you progress. When you miss a question you are lowered a level.
As you are answering questions, you will also being helping the fight against world hunger. Every time you answer a trivia question, you will earn 10 grains of rice. The site is able to pay for the rice through sponsors. So, the more visitors the site gets, the more rice they will be able to donate. If you sign up (for free!), it will track how much rice you have donated. You can also choose to play and earn as a group. These are optional, because you do not have to sign up in order to earn rice for the hungry.
How Much will Rice Help?
In the F&Q section on the site, they stated that FreeRice users have fed millions of people since the launch of the site in 2007. Every correct answer you get while answering trivia donates 10 grains of rice. There are 48 grains of rice in a gram. The World Food Program provides about 400 grams of rice per person, per day (to be used with other ingredients to ensure proper nutrition). It doesn't matter if you answer 4 questions or 4,000, every little bit helps prevent empty stomachs and hunger pains all around the world.