Easy Giving

Charity Clicks
Making a difference has never been so easy thanks to Web sites that allow Internet users to support various causes with a click of the mouse. For each click, advertisers appearing on the sites donate a set amount of money to selected projects.

While some site advertisers contribute additional funds if consumers visit or buy from them, no purchases are necessary to make a difference. Clicking alone helps the needy. Advertisers benefit because they get their names associated with worthwhile causes.

There are click-to-donate sites that work to feed the hungry, provide care for landmine victims, protect the environment, preserve rainforests, and much more. Each site explains its project in detail, which is a helpful way to learn about problems around the world.

Visitors can only contribute one click per cause per day, a system that is monitored by computers.

• EcologyFund.com showcases a number of land preservation projects. At the bottom of the site, there are several running meters, one that counts the human population, another that tracks natural habitats, and a third that monitors natural habitats per capita. While the meters are running too quickly to make any calculations, what information can you learn from them right away?
  
  
• In the year 2000, the Rainforest Site received 15,559,026 clicks, which saved 204,923,061 square feet of land. Based on these figures, estimate how much each click is worth in terms of square feet. Round the numbers up or down to make the task easier. Riverdeep's Destination Math MSC III course, Ordering and Rounding Whole Numbers, can help.
  
  
• Based on your answer above, if you clicked on the Rainforest Site each day for a year, about how many square feet of rainforest would you be responsible for saving?

The Math of Donations
Click-to-donate sites keep track of how much good is being done by Internet users. For example, the Child Survival Site keeps track of the vitamin A capsules that are being donated to children in developing countries around the world. Many of these children do not get enough vitamin A and, as a result, are vulnerable to blindness and death from diseases such as malaria.

• The 43,325 clicks from May 16 resulted in the donation of 955.5 vitamin A capsules. Estimate how many capsules one click buys.
  
  
• The Child Survival Site gets an average of 64,000 clicks a day. Based on your estimate from the question above, about how many vitamin A capsules are typically donated in one day?
  
  
• How many vitamin A capsules would this result in at the end of the year?
  
  
• If you went by the donation numbers from the days shown above, what would the average daily number of clicks be?
  
  
• How many capsules did each advertiser have to contribute on May 14?

Feeding the Hungry

About 24,000 people die daily from hunger or complications caused by chronic malnutrition. Seventy-five percent of those people are children. The Hunger Site donates one cup of food for each click received.

• The Hunger Site anticipates being able to generate more than 2.5 million cups of food per week through Internet clicks. Look at the sample week below. By how many cups of food does the site miss its goal for this week?

 

Date	Clicks	Cups of Food Donated
May 7	170,830	170,830
May 6	106,353	106,353
May 5	92,725	92,725
May 4	152,306	152,306
May 3	164,979	164,979
May 2	174,542	174,542
May 1	165,599	165,599
Totals

• A successful Web site attracts about 150,000 new or "unique" visitors each month. If the Hunger Site received 150,000 new visitors in January, and those people returned once a week to make contributions for the rest of the year, how many cups of food would be donated?
  
  
  
  Learn More

• The Atlantic rainforest in Brazil has all but disappeared. Learn about the value of the remaining land in the Riverdeep story, "Remnants of a Rainforest."
  
  
• The Pantanal, a wetlands area in Southwestern Brazil, has also attracted considerable attention from conservationists. Read the Riverdeep story, "Saving a Part of Brazil."
  
  
• To learn more about how populations inside a community affect each other, experiment with the Riverdeep Life Science activity, Exploring Food Chains and Food Webs. (Requires Logal Express. Download a free trial subscription.)
  
  
• Read the Riverdeep article, "Taking a World View," to learn about the Amazon rainforest from one of the world's leading explorers.
  

More Links

• Learn more about how we affect our ecosystems at EcologyFund for Kids.
  
  
• Our lifestyle impacts the environment. Find out what your "ecological footprint" is by using a ecological footprint calculator. Your impact on the Earth might be more dramatic than you think!
  
  
• Was your ecological footprint higher than you would like? Discover some eco-friendly tips that will help you live in better harmony with the natural world.