as a subject
The subject of the sentence is who or what the sentence is about. Most of the time in simple sentences like this one, the subject is at the beginning of the sentence. A gerund is a verb that acts like a noun and ends in -ing.
Direct objects receive the action of the verb. This sentence does not have an action verb so it does not have a direct object. The indirect object receives the direct object. For example. I gave Jack the ball. Ball is the direct object because it receives the action "gave". I also think about it in terms of what do I touch first if I'm going to do the action. Then the indirect object is Jack because he receives the ball. He is where I'd go to second. An appositive is a noun that renames or describes another noun. It is usually set off by commas. For example, Jack, my brother, took the ball. My brother is the appositive because it is renaming or describing who Jack is.
As the waves crashed on the beach.
Answer:
The world’s smallest population of mountain gorillas—a subspecies of the eastern gorilla—is split in two and scientists have debated whether they may be two separate subspecies. A bit more than half live in the Virunga Mountains, a range of extinct volcanoes that border the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. The remainder can be found in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. Since the discovery of the mountain gorilla subspecies in 1902, its population has endured years of war, hunting, habitat destruction and disease—threats so severe that it was once thought the species might be extinct by the end of the twentieth century.
Explanation:
Without adjectives, we could not describe things. Color would be less precious to us: there would be cars, but not red cars or blue cars or black cars. In describing a cat to someone who’s never owned a cat, all you could say is, “A cat is an animal with ears and a tail.” You couldn’t explain its soft fur or sharp claws.