On Oct 19, 2007, at 16:51, Janice Blair wrote:
This site is addictive, informative and helps provide free rice.
http://freerice.com/index.php
Interesting to see how many words you can get right before failing
miserably on one.
Thanks, Janice. The site is, indeed, highly addictive and I've
bookmarked it, for frequent visits (and also for forwarding to non-chat
friends).
Once I found out what it was all about -- every "correct!" word is
worth 10 grains of rice -- I checked how much that was (what can I say?
I'm obsessive. Sosumi<g>). We use long-grain rice but, even so, the
pile wouldn't have fed a baby bird, never mind a child. The
accompanying graphics make you feel good -- the bowl fills up with
every 10 correct words (100 grains) and you start with an empty one
again. But it must be a very small bowl; even 100 grains is a pitiful
amount, in "real life". So, I set my sights at 1000 grains -- 100 words
correctly identified; there's a limit to how much time I can spend
playing around with the English language :)
The site warns from the start that, if you identify a word correctly,
the next one is going to be harder (and vice versa; if you fail, your
next word is going to be easier). After a while, I noticed that there's
a level of difficulty given (lower right-hand corner) with every word;
afterwards, that was *all* I watched, checking the accumulation (bowl)
only once in a long while... I got as high as level 50 a couple of
times but it was strictly by guessing (I refused to use a dictionary);
mostly, I stayed around 45-48 level, which meant that only a few words
were identified by "winging it", while I *knew* most of them.
Very satisfactory, all around :) Thanks again.
T, a language freak in rainy Lexington. Thankfully, the lace I've been
working on is easy enough so that I can make it in artificial light...
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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