Last week we looked at the difference between "open" and "opened", where the former is an ordinary adjective whereas the latter is a past (passive) participle, but this week there are more examples of the present (active) participle or gerund (verbal noun), that is to say the +ING form. It may be fun to know the grammatical terminology ;-), but it's more interesting to know where and how the +ING form is used.

It indicates activities, especially sports (skiing, skating, cycling), work (code-marking, painting, cleaning) or trades/professions (mining, engineering). It indicates processes when it is used after prepositions (in recognizing, in using), or in verb tenses (managers will be traveling), or as a noun (the beginning, the opening, the best placings). It is used to shorten clauses, so "silver-medal-winning team" is short for "the team which won the silver medal", "including" means "which includes", and "as well as getting" is short for "and she got". It's flipping useful, the +ING form is.