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“Soporific” comes from the Latin sopor (deep sleep) and refers to something that tends to cause drowsiness. The sentence itself supplies a context cue: the professor promises a “livelier demonstration,” implying the current approach was dull enough to make students sleepy. “Sleep-inducing” (B) captures that meaning precisely. “Stimulating” (A) is the opposite; if the slides had been stimulating, there would be no need to liven things up. “Confusing” (C) emphasizes lack of clarity rather than drowsiness; while confusion can exhaust readers, it is not the core denotation here. “Irrelevant” (D) would mean off-topic, which does not necessarily cause sleepiness. Nelson–Denny vocabulary tasks frequently hinge on tone and self-critique cues from speakers (“admitted,” “promised to improve”). In time-pressured settings, pair explicit semantic families—sleep/drowsy (soporific, somnolent)—with their antonyms (bracing, invigorating) and verify by substitution: “the slide deck was sleep-inducing” keeps both sense and logic intact. Recognizing such register markers sharpens accuracy and reading efficiency across passages.