Playing with food

I like wasting time as much as the next guy. I play computer mahjong, and recently I discovered the site where I can play Space Invaders and Pacman and relive my college years. But my good friend Sandi Shelton has gotten me totally hooked on Free Rice.

Free Rice is a vocabulary game. It gives you a word and a multiple choice of definitions. If you get it right, you get a harder word. If you get it wrong, you get an easier word. And for each word you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program.

So you can’t even think of this as a guilty pleasure. It’s actually Doing Good. Which means, of course, that there’s a lot more justification in playing.

And I love it. I love it when I figure out the definition of a word I don’t know.  I use the same sort of logic those kids on the annual national spelling bee do: I look at the word and then at the definitions and try to figure out the parts of the word that might give me clues. It totally makes you feel superior when you get the words right.

Now these are words that would never be on this blog. Because this blog’s reading level is at the elementary school level.

You can check your blog’s reading level at this site here or by clicking on the icon. I guess all the cussing that goes on over here that gave us an R rating is understandable to all those little kids.

So go play Free Rice and see if you can come up with a sentence made from the words you guess right that could get us at least to a middle school level.  Here’s mine — at 100 grains of rice:

The dutiful, urbane insurgent is a factious granger.

Karen

Comments

[Clair Lamb]

Ooh, my blog is College/Undergrad!

Now I don't know whether to be proud, or worry about being too elitist.

[Daniel Hatadi]

Ooh, I got College/Postgrad too! And while we're all rating each other, I got 46 on Free Rice. I'm sure someone round these parts has got higher, so fess up.

[David Terrenoire]

My blog is rated High School, I guess because all the fucks and goddamns make it sound like a teacher's lounge.

Fuck.

[David Terrenoire]

The best I could do was 44, which makes me feel like a dunce after Daniel's 46.

I say again: Fuck.

[Karen Olson]

Oh, come on, guys. I just got 400 grains of rice. We are writers, word people. Maybe watching those spelling bees really has helped.

And I don't see anyone here using their words in a sentence.

[Lori G. Armstrong]

Hey, I got 1200 grains of rice, but never made it past level 41...

[Daniel Hatadi]

I think reading level almost has an inverse relationship to readability, so I'm going to start swearing more.

My rice grains were up to around 4000, which I calculated as a very small bowl of food. But my eyes started hurting, so I hope the guy that gets my grains is a little fellow.