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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