Please help.

Which sentence contains a gerund?

Jenna stood in front of the closed door. she knew she hadevery right to be here. your exam scores are just as high ascora's, she said to herself. there's no reason you shouldhave been left off the math team while cora was namedcaptain. she had never been one to rock the boat, but shecouldn't just let this lie. she pushed the door open and saw ms. jenson, the mathteam advisor, sitting at her desk. "ms. jenson? can i talk toyou for a minute? " her voice wavered, but she tried to lookconfident."sure," said ms. jenson, "but i hope this isn't about namingcora captain of the math team. i'm afraid my decision isfinal."jenna took a deep breath and prepared to plead her case. which statement best describes the external conflict in this passage?

Maria is writing a persuasive essay for her english class. she asks marshall if it is important to use rhetorical appeals in her essay. which reasons could marshall give in favor of using rhetorical appeals

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant