Select the most appropriate ANTONYM of the underlined word in the following sentence to fill in the blank. Most of the land near the town is barren, but the efforts of the farmers have turned it ________.

Correct — D. The trigger is the conjunction but, which forces the second clause to reverse the first.

The land is barren, so what the farmers' efforts turn it into has to be the opposite of barren — land that now produces crops.

Fertile is that word, and it is the only option in the set that is not a synonym of barren: option (d).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  sterile — Sterile means unable to produce crops or offspring at all. It restates barren, so after but the sentence would say the farmers worked hard and changed nothing.
• (b)
  unfruitful — Unfruitful means yielding no fruit and no result. It is a softer synonym of barren rather than its reverse, so the contrast the sentence sets up collapses.
• (c)
  infertile — Infertile is the direct negative of fertile, built with the prefix in-. It puts the negative on the wrong side of but. Strip the prefix and you have the word the blank wants.

A fill-in antonym item is decided by the connector, not by the blank.

But, however, yet and although announce a reversal, so the missing word must sit opposite the word already on the page. And, so and therefore announce continuation, and then the missing word matches instead.

Here sterile, unfruitful and infertile crowd into one sense-group. Three near-identical options are themselves a signal: the odd word out is the key.

Key facts

• But signals contrast, so the clause after it must reverse the clause before it.
• Fertile land is land capable of producing abundant crops.
• Sterile, infertile and unfruitful all describe an inability to produce, which is why they group with barren.

Common traps

• Filling the blank with the first plausible farming word without checking what but demands.
• Reading infertile as something different from barren because it looks like a medical term.
• Treating unfruitful as mildly positive because it carries no negative prefix.

No directly related past PYQ was found.