Free Rice!

November 11, 2007 | Filed Under Give time/money, Learn something, Website 

New site, FreeRice.com, gives away ten grains of rice for each vocabulary word that you get right.  But you don’t personally receive the rice.  The advertisers will donate the rice to the United Nations to “assist” in ending hunger.  While on one hand, I think it’s a cool idea, on the other, it just pisses me off.  I was on the site for a good twenty or so minutes getting up to the highest vocab level–50–with the help of Dictionary.com.  At the end of it, I’ve donated 750 grains of rice.  I would’ve continued to 1,000, but I got bored.  How much does 1,000 grains of rice cost?  NOTHING!  The advertisers I remember seeing were ReadersDigest.com, Liz Claiborne, Mac.com, and Radisson Hotels.  Multi-million dollar corporations (on the low end) paying pennies to advertise on a campaign to “end hunger.”  Why the cynical quotation marks?  Because ending hunger is easy, but it doesn’t benefit ruling parties so it won’t happen.

It’s a kind of cool idea, though–getting people to participate in something slightly charitable (at least on the surface) while increasing their vocabularies.

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