It’s that time of year when you begin considering what you’d like to improve in 2008, creating your annual “New Year’s Resolutions List.” If you’re like many people, envisioning a year in which you join the volunteer circuit, helping to solve the world’s hunger and poverty issues, there’s at least one easy way to get a head start, and it costs you little time, and no money. It’s also entertaining, always a beneficial feature of any activity.

The game is called Free Rice, and you can find it at FreeRice.com. It’s a sister site of Poverty.com, and has two stated goals: “1) Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free; and 2) Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.”

The game works as follows: Visit the site, and you’ll see a word in bold, like “Deserve.” There are four options below that define “Deserve” and you pick the correct one. The options are: charmed, imperious, worthy, and mammoth. When you select the correct answer (worthy), 20 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations.

On the site today, December 19, 2007, it says that 386,617,940 grains of rice were donated yesterday.

So where does the rice go? The site has a pie chart of donations, which you can view here. The most common countries donated to are: Myanmar, Nepal, Cambodia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.

FreeRice.com’s donations are made possible, of course, with the help of its sponsors. As any savvy digital media observer knows, page views-per-visitor are an excellent way of increasing sponsorship awareness, and a game as simple and beneficial as Free Rice is sure to generate lots of support.

Get an early start on your Resolutions List by playing.