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Vocabulary quiz: Free Rice

This vocabulary test is really great? Freerice, unlike a traditional vocab test, has a large dictionary and measures hardness of words by how many people get them right this means it's amazingly good at finding words right on the boundary of what you know, ones you've heard used somewhere, but can't quite place, rather than either being words anyone knows, or common long words, or words so obscure only people in specialist fields know them, or words simply famous for being obscure.

This gives an unfair advantage in the quiz to people who know words from having heard them used in books and conversations with articulate people, rather than people who read dictionaries for fun :) So it suits me.

The questions are tailored to your responses, after a few minutes finding their own level at a category of words you know 3/4 of. I could play all day.

Also, it (apparently) raises advertising revue, from which it donates to charity.

This morning, I got up to level 45/50 before starting getting them wrong. What do you get?

Geography quiz: Statetris

There've been many geography quizes going round that ask if you can place countries in europe, but this is so cool because it's Tetris!

Each country falls from the north, and you have to manoeuvre it into position. There's some clues, for instance, it has to be one of the ones on the bottom.

In the easy level the country is labelled. In intermediate, it isn't. In hard, it needs to be rotated to the correct orientation.

It's really satisfying because when you've completed all-but-one, the last country is Russia, which is really big, and really obvious, so it's such a release to be able to plonk it down with a thunderous crash to finish the level.

Date: 2007-10-29 03:29 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] vyvyan.livejournal.com
I played this for a while the other week. I got it up to 50 and mostly kept it there, but after about 2000 grains of rice the words began repeating :-(

Date: 2007-10-29 03:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] vyvyan.livejournal.com
I just tried it again and got from scratch to level 50 in 2 minutes.

Date: 2007-10-29 05:46 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com
:)

Though lets not get a quickest-to-50 competition :)

IIRC it first calibrates you with a small number of questions designed to place you approximately (though I don't know how high that goes) so you start of about 40, and then have to climb to 50.

but after about 2000 grains of rice the words began repeating :-(

Yeah. It looks only a month old, hopefully if it's popular they'll be able to expand the dictionary.

Date: 2007-10-29 06:52 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] miriammoules.livejournal.com
It's great if you play scrabble. I learnt pawky today, which is huge scrabble points for a non-7 word