Gerunds are not present participles!
Gerunds are not Present Participles! Where a gerund would be in English you would use an infinitive in Spanish. The present progressive doesn't use a gerund it uses the present participle. Sorry, I just noticed on the website that the two were equal, and such an equivalency is not accurate. 
4 Answers
Gerunds are not present participles!
Thanks for the input, froseal.
This has already been pointed out and explained thoroughly a lot of times in this website. Our dictionary here is great, but it has flaws too, and that (un)distinction, unfortunately, is one of them.
Here are links to some threads discussing this:
Gerunds are not Present Participles! Where a gerund would be in English you would use an infinitive in Spanish. The present progressive doesn't use a gerund it uses the present participle. Sorry, I just noticed on the website that the two were equal, and such an equivalency is not accurate.
Very astute observation. I assume that by mentioning the present participle, you are referring to English. While Spanish did, at one time, have a distinct present participle (remnants of which can still be found in words such as "amante," "interesante," "distante," "decadente," "naciente," etc), this is no longer the case, and the gerundio is the terminology employed when describing the impersonal form used to form progressive tenses in Spanish.
In any case, this issue has been broached (quite eloquently) in the past by Samdie in these two threads:
Sometimes you should not only try to see the kind of word, but its place in a sentence. What I mean by this in a more technical and specific language: semantics vs sintax.
A gerund in English can basically be: part of the head of a predicate ("I am going to the cinema"), or it can also act as head of subject ("Smoking is bad for your health").
If you translate "word by word", you will fall in using gerunds in Spanish where you should be using another kind of word to accomplish the same FUNCTION as in English.
In Spanish, the first sentence will translate "Estoy yendo al cine" when you don't refer of it as a plan, but as an action in progress, "Voy a ir al cine" when you're talking about something you're going to do. The second sentence will translate as "Fumar es malo para tu salud", using an infinitive form of the verb, acting as a noun (the same funcition as the gerund in English)
I hope this answer is clear and can help!
A gerund in English can basically be: part of the head of a predicate ("I am going to the cinema")
That is the present participle, not the gerund.
