READING ITEM:
Although irrigation has made it possible to grow crops on land that was once considered unproductive, the enormous quantity of water needed to make arid land fecund has sometimes led to depletion of ground supplies.

In the sentence above, fecund most nearly means

(A) barren
(B) fertile
(C) expansive
(D) unproductive
(E) phlachinatory

Answer: (B)

READING EXPLANATION:
This sort of item is used on both the ACT (in the Reading Test) and the SAT (in Critical Reading). The task is to determine the meaning of the key word from the context. In this case, the speaker, in the first clause, talks about land that was once unproductive but has been irrigated to permit the growing of crops. The second clause explains a consequence of this practice. So, the land referred to in the second clause is land that was once too dry (arid) for cultivation but that has been rendered fecund, or fertile, by irrigation.

Test-Taking Tip: Phlachinatory is a word that we made up for this item. The test-writers do not do that, but we wanted to make a point. Since the purpose of a vocabulary item is to test whether the student can figure out the meaning from context, the test-writers are not likely to use a difficult vocabulary word for the correct answer choice. Therefore, avoid unknown words when answering vocabulary items.