FreeRice.com: Fight Hunger One Question at a Time

Do you know how many grains of rice are in a gram? I'll tell you. Approximately 48. In countries where rice is a main part of the diet, it takes approximately 400 grams of rice to feed one person for one day.

So, if you did the math, 48 grains of rice times 400 grams, equals 19,200 grains of rice to feed a person in an impoverished country for a day. What if I told you that getting that many grains of rice to the people who needed it most was not only possible, but easier than you thought.

FreeRice.com is a quiz site that offers guests the opportunity to take quizzes that challenge their intelligence and promises to donate 10 grains of rice (or the current monetary value of ten grains of rice) to the United Nations World Food Program. To date, the site claims to have fed millions of people since the site was started in late 2007. Examples of those who have benefited from the rice raised through FreeRice.com include 13,500 pregnant and nursing women in Cambodia who were fed for two months, 108,000 Bhutanese refugees in Nepal who were fed for three days, and 66,000 school children in Uganda who were fed for a week. With numbers like these, nobody can deny the power and symbolism of a simple grain of rice.

All money raised (that's right, 100%) from the sponsors of FreeRice.com is donated to the United Nations World Food Program or towards donating to the program. The creators and maintainers of the site gain no personal profit from the site.

Quizzes offered on the site include art, chemistry, English, geography, foreign languages, and math. Levels of difficulty can be adjusted and range from the very easy to the most difficult. With each right answer, the level of difficulty will also automatically increase. A photo of a bowl on the right side of the quiz screen gets more and more full with rice as more questions are answered correctly, allowing the player to visualize how much rice he or she is really contributing to the fight against hunger. Ads from sponsors appear as banners below the quiz screen. An option of the site is to set it to remember how much rice you have personally donated. Under normal conditions, the site will not record your donations, and the feature must be enabled through the "options" tab at the top of the web site.

All in all, ten grains of rice may not seem like a lot, I don't even think that ten grains would constitute a mouth full. But, when you take into consideration the fact that FreeRice.com is being played all around the world by multiple users at multiple times of the day, those grains of rice really add up. So next time you find yourself at your desk wondering how you should kill the last ten minutes of your lunch break or shift, log onto FreeRice.com and take a few quizzes. Not only will you help fill the belly of somebody who really needs it, but you may also walk away just a little bit smarter than when you started.

Sources:

Free Rice.