If you’ve been on the internet in the past year, you have likely come across Free Rice, the online vocabulary building game that donates 20 grains of rice to the World Food Program for each word correctly defined. The site went viral after its launch last year. To date, 36 billion grains of rice have been donated through the site by sponsors who advertise on the Free Rice homepage. It’s a win-win: users build their vocab, the hungry get fed.
Today, the World Food Program announced that rice donated through Free Rice is going to the Burmese survivors of last month’s cyclone; two of the site’s sponsors, YUM! and Unilever are paying for the consignments of rice to Burma.
Not a bad way to find out that “sastruga” means “wind-formed snow ridge.”