These people no longer have to guess why their water bill is so high, and if you want to donate some rice and improve your vocabulary, try this site. Both sent to me by Matt who tells me he just woke up from a twenty-four hour nap. For whatever it’s worth, my average score is 41.
rakkity
46 at the point I got tired (down from a peak of 49)
=> 510 grains of rice
adam
47 at 910 grains (48 at 500 was my peak, then I fell to 43 before clawing back). Many are words I’ve never seen, half of my answers WAGs …
Jennifer
You guys are a whole lot more erudite than I. I fought my way to 43, and 410 grains. How many cups of cooked rice do you suppose we donated today?
rakkity
“Testmanship” is the key to getting a higher score. I had lots of WAGs, but on some of the unrecognizable words that were nouns (say), I could rule out the verbs or adverbs as possible answers. An sometimes I could dissect the question word into a recognizable Latin part and pick the most likely answer. This means, of course, that on many of my correct answers I had no real idea of the word’s meaning!
Jennifer
Yeah, what I found amusing were the WAGs where the choices of answer were WAGs too. Did I ever tell my father’s testmanship story? Now I’m forgetting the details again — whether he got 80% or a just-passing-score — but it was on a standardized test of a foreign language of which he did not speak or understand a word.
Was speed an issue on this rice thing?
rakkity
That’s real testmanship! What language, if you can recall? I must admit that testmanship was a major factor when I took and passed a French reading test as a graduate student. (And I had never taken a course in French.)
Speed was not a factor in the rice quiz. I stopped in the middle for 10 minutes or so.
anon
49, 810 grains, after about a million tries and half a dozen words added to my vocabulary, which I will never remember out of context.
P.S. I quit.
rakkity
For 4 of us, that’s over 2,600 grains of rice, plus whatever Michael got. That may be as much as a cup!
Hil K
I brought my lap top to a boring lecture class and did this for almost an hour. I got 4150 grains of rice! Do you think that’s a whole bowl? I’m not sure how much of the vocabulary I retained, though.
Matt
You have no idea how long i have been doing this for, nor do you. Way to much time spent on this, maybe i should stop too.
michael
Not only have I never seen so many words I’ve never seen before, but most of the words I’m familiar with sport new definitions.
Jennifer
OK, I just counted the grains in a tablespoon of rice. Any guesses? Or guesses as to how long it took?
Jennifer
I’ll have to ask my dad again about that story.
As to the grains of rice thing … I’ll just say that it’s extra hard for me to really believe that chessboard / exponential problem, having counted. I got 625 per tablespoon; therefore 10,000 per cup. Now, that’s raw rice; cooked it will take 3x that space. But still, rak, we’re talking LESS than a cup for those 2,600 grains. Anon, you got 5 cups raw; 15 cups cooked.
anon
No, Jennifer, I was vague. 49 was my score for one second; I only donated one T plus less than one t of rice.
Jennifer
Ahh! (I missed the .)
Jen
AAHHHGGG!!! I clicked away to read the rest of the site and lost my place. I was up to 500 grains, but I didn’t look at my last level. Dang… Somewhere in the 40s.
And when I first read Michael’s entry before I looked at the rice site, I thought his average nap time was 41 hours.
rakkity
HAhahahhaa! Even Matt, I believe, couldn’t sleep 41 hours.
michael
My record was 22 hours set when I was twenty-one, which Matt has broken on two occasions. I went to sleep at 4 PM in a motel in Tonopah, Nevada, and I woke up to the sound of the mail being delivered the next afternoon.
Speaking of Matt, how come when I don’t post he’s all over me, but when I get back to some regularity, especially for him, I don’t hear a peep?
BirdBrain
OK — apparently I am the only one who thought that it would be more fun to watch the cat flush the toilet than take a vocab test!? Obviously I’m too stupid for this blog.
michael
Speaking of rice, my father’s sister, Betty Jean, told us this anecdote in Latham.
When he’d take her grocery shopping he’d tell her to be sure and buy food that swells.
rakkity
Like freeze-dried? I wonder if your dad would have liked the “food that swells” that we’ve taken on camping trips over the years. Rice, of course, is usually one of the main ingredients, but there’s usually other stuff in there that swells too.