The reaping is an annual event that takes place in every district before each Hunger Games, where the tributes of the upcoming Games are chosen.
Each district's escort randomly chooses the name of one male and one female tribute from two separate glass balls. Those picked are now the official tributes for the upcoming Games.
In the 74th Hunger Games, Effie Trinket chose the names in District 12.
Volunteering
If someone so chooses, he or she may take the place of a tribute in a process known as volunteering. This is often done by Careers, individuals who spend their lives training to compete in the Hunger Games. It is sometimes done for other reasons, though, such as when Katniss Everdeen volunteered to protect her reaped sister, Prim.
The volunteering process is simple in most districts, especially the later ones, but in earlier districts, such as the Career districts, (1, 2, and 4) volunteering is a more complicated process.
Tesserae and Extra Names
For the residents of various districts, any child between the ages of twelve through eighteen, if it is needed, they can apply for a tessera, which supplies them with a meager supply of grain and oil. They can also choose to do this for each of their family members as well. However, each tessera they sign up for puts another slip with their name in the reaping glass jar. It is also cumulative, so Katniss Everdeen, when she was sixteen, had her name put in the glass jar twenty times. Gale, who has five family members including himself, had his name put in the glass jar forty-two times.
Quarter Quells
In Quarter Quells, the reapings are different from the standard rules.
25th Hunger Games
In the reaping of the 25th Hunger Games, contestants were chosen by the other residents of their district rather than drawn from a glass jar.
50th Hunger Games
In the reaping of the 50th Hunger Games, two tributes were drawn from each jar rather than the usual one, causing there to be 24 extra tributes fighting in the arena.
75th Hunger Games
In the 75th Hunger Games, the pool of available tributes shrunk rapidly as the only previous victor's names were in the jars. In some districts, such as District 12, there was only one living victor for a gender, and they therefore had a 100% chance of having to compete in the Games. Additionally, because most victors had won their games years ago, most were older than the usual twelve to eighteen years old; one tribute, Mags, was eighty, and volunteered to take the place of Annie Cresta.
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