Do you know what ‘vicissitude’ means? If you guessed right, how great does it feel to be sending lunch to a hungry child? What do I mean, you ask? I’m talking about FreeRice, a nonprofit poverty-fighting organization, allows you to sharpen your vocabulary skills while sending much needed rice to countries within the United Nations World Food Program network. For each word you define correctly, FreeRice will donate 20 grains of rice through the UN. Don’t worry about getting a word wrong - the FreeRice program adjusts to your vocab level, and you can even save the setting on your computer to allow FreeRice to keep track of how much you’ve donated.

You may not think about where your next meal is coming from, and 20 grains of rice sounds like rice in a bucket, right? Think about it global terms. Just yesterday, FreeRice reports over 91 million grains of rice have been donated - that’s 91,009,660. Since FreeRice began in October 2007, over 17 billion grains in total have been sent out. Spend a minute playing, learning, and giving. If you have teenagers (especially ones taking the SATs!) sit them down for vocab practice. And be sure to pass FreeRice along to everyone!