Full Practice Round

The Rooftop Garden

When Elena first proposed testing her hypothesis on the school's rooftop garden, her teacher was skeptical. The soil there was notoriously poor, and previous attempts to grow vegetables had proven futile. But Elena was undeterred. She spent weeks amending the soil with compost, testing pH levels, and mapping which corners of the roof received the most sunlight. Her classmates, who had initially dismissed the project as impractical, began to take notice when the first seedlings pushed through the soil three weeks ahead of schedule. By the end of the semester, the rooftop garden yielded more tomatoes than anyone had predicted — including Elena's own conservative estimate. Her teacher, reviewing the results, admitted that persistence had accomplished what skepticism alone never could have: a genuine transformation of what everyone had assumed was unusable ground.

As used in the passage, the word "futile" most nearly means: