Given the following passage

"However, by the turn of the 1990s the downward trend was starting to reverse; England had been successful in the 1990 FIFA World Cup, reaching the semi-finals. UEFA, European football's governing body, lifted the five-year ban on English clubs playing in European competitions in 1990 (resulting in Manchester United lifting the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup in 1991) and the Taylor Report on stadium safety standards, which proposed expensive upgrades to create all-seater stadiums in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, was published in January of that year.",

answer the following question. Note that the answer is present within the text.

Question: How far did England make it in the first year of the 1990s?
semi-finals
This passage is talking about the downward trend of English football clubs, and then it reverses in 1990. In this year England was successful at FIFA World Cup as they made it to semi-finals.
So you can see that "semi-finals" appears in the text directly, thus we choose semi-final as our answer.