I believe the direct object is the swimming hole and the indirect object is the ranch. In school, I learned that you should be able to write the sentence without the indirect object and it should still make sense. Therefore, the sentence without the indirect object would be "Our cousins showed us the swimming hole.".
B. It would emphasize important details and delete irrelevant ones.
Well, let's see... I don't know what a coordinating conjunction is off the top of my head, but I know B isn't the answer, since 'independent' means 'highly capable of handling oneself'. C <em>certainly</em> isn't the answer, simply because you can see by this answer they obviously do combine with a dependent clause from time to time. That leaves us with D and A, which both leave the same term. However, I do believe I can use the word preceding <em>conjunction</em>, which is <em>coordinating</em>, to realize that 'and,' 'but,' and 'or' are coordinating conjunctions. Seriously, D cannot be the answer because not every sentence starts with any of those. So your answer is A.
Answer: It's the 22nd Century. A tough, pioneering people mine the moon for Helium-3 to produce energy for a desperate, war-torn Earth. Sixteen-year old Crater Trueblood loves his job as a Helium-3 miner. But when he finds courage he didn’t know he had and saves a fellow miner, his life changes forever. Impressed by his heroism, the owner of the mine orders Crater to undertake a dangerous mission. Crater doubts himself, but he has no choice. He must go.
With the help of Maria, the mine owner’s frustrating but gorgeous granddaughter, and his gillie—a sentient and sometimes insubordinate clump of slime mold cells—Crater must fight both human and subhuman enemies. He’ll battle his way across a thousand miles of deadly but magnificent lunar terrain before vaulting into the far reaches of space, there to recover an astonishing object that could mean the difference between life and death for every inhabitant on the moon.
