End World Hunger While
Improving Your Vocabulary

The concept is simple: for each vocabulary question you answer correctly, you earn 20 grains of rice donated to the United Nations World Food Program to help end world hunger. Those correct answers and grains of rice add up, especially since people all over the world are playing the Vocabulary game on the FreeRice.com website. Since its beginning 2 years ago, over 53 billion grains of rice have been donated by a variety of sponsors. It takes just 400 grains a day to provide the daily rice portion for one person.

One of our client families, the Homanns of St. Charles, Illinois, told us about this terrific resource. Carol Homann's mother, Jo Ann Fischer, was looking for resources that could help another grandchild with vocabulary, and a friend from her church recommended the website. Jo Ann, a former college English instructor, says, "I think FreeRice is absolutely fabulous. It does two things: it enables you to do something for someone else, and it teaches you how to use prefixes and suffixes to better guess at definitions of words you might not know. We like that every time you play, the words are always new. The game gives you an opportunity to experience success early on by repeating words you missed." Her family even holds FreeRice competitions, setting a 5 minute playing time limit for each person, then seeing how many grains of rice each player earned during their round.

FreeRice makes building vocabulary fun, and it's free. How does it work?

First, you are given questions that increase in difficulty to see which ones you answer correctly. Then you are assigned a playing level and as you play, you progress to higher levels with successive correct answers. Whether beginner or scholar or somewhere in between, the FreeRice vocabulary game will challenge you just enough to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Vocabulary is important to success in both academics as well as one's career. Words are the tools in your communication tool box; the more you know, the better you communicate. According to the FreeRice website, the benefits of building your vocabulary include the ability to:

• Formulate your ideas better
  

• Write better papers, emails and business letters
  

• Speak more precisely and persuasively
  

• Comprehend more of what you read
  

• Read faster because you comprehend better
  

• Get better grades in high school, college and graduate school
  

• Score higher on tests like the SAT, GRE, LSAT and GMAT
  

• Perform better at job interviews and conferences
  

• Sell yourself, your services, and your products better
  

• Be more effective and successful at your job

Take a few minutes to check out the FreeRice game -and tell us what you think. And if you have a favorite resource like this that you would like to share with other Career Vision families - let us know! Send us an email.

For a 3-minute video overview, click here.

© Copyright 2008, Career Vision. Article may be reprinted with permission.

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