Updated Thursday 7 January 2010

The Free Rice web vocabulary phenomenon that has captured the imagination of millions of people around the world has now turned its attention to an exciting range of new games encompassing art, maths, language and chemistry. Check it out!

The new and expanded version of Free Rice, the online vocabulary game where guessing the correct meaning of a word triggers a donation of rice to WFP, covers a whole range of subjects.

Players are now be able to test their knowledge of multiplication, world capital cities, chemical symbols, foreign languages and even the styles of famous painters. Every correct answer generates a donation of 20 grains of rice to WFP.

Visitors to FreeRice peaked last year at around 500,000 a day and the site is still regularly used by around 40,000 people a day. Over the ten months since its launch, it has generated more than 40 billion grains of rice in donations to WFP – enough to feed more than 2 million people for a day.

As the new games come on-line, there is an opportunity to attract more players and increase donations of rice to the world’s hungry. So far, donations generated by the FreeRice site have been sent to feed hungry people in Bangladesh, Uganda, Nepal and – most recently – Myanmar, where hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless when Cyclone Nargis struck in May 2008.