My friend Tracey has alerted me to a website, and I’ve just spent an– at turns– happy, surprised, confused and clever ten minutes there, the upshot of which is the donation of 760 grains of rice for distribution by the United Nations.
www.freerice.com is a vocabulary website. They give you a word and four options for a synonym. For every word you correctly define, the UN donates ten grains of rice. And every time you get that answer right, the degree of difficulty in defining the words increases.
At first it was easy. The wooden bowl at the right of the screen just kept filling up. And then suddenly there were Words I Had Never Seen Before and had No Idea how to pronounce. Suddenly my word level plummeted, and the words were too easy, and then I was working my way back up. Sometimes, of course, one guesses correctly. Sometimes one can figure out the words by their roots (I love this). And sometimes– Bliss!– one knows what the words mean.
But it’s all for a good cause, you see, and not just to satisfy a brain ever-hungry for new words. 760 grains of rice. I don’t know exactly what that amount looks like or what kind of appetite, if any, it would fill. But you can bet I’m going back to play that game again.
Meanwhile, after a day of parent-teacher conferences and another evening (Bill’s been gone since Saturday) of single-parenting, this little diversion was just what I needed. Vocabulary fun with a social conscience. I’m not sure it gets better than that.
Thanks, Tracey!
