Cleft Sentences

Cleft Sentences are a way of emphasising particular words or expressions

What and Who
ex.:
Mary kept a pig in the garden shed.
Mary was the person who kept a pig in the garden shed.
The person who kept a pig in the garden shed was Mary
A pig was what Mary kept in the garden shed.
What Mary kept in the garden shed was a pig.

-Mary and a pig are the words we want to emphasise.
-Is/Was is the verb that links the emphasised word
-and the expression the person who/what
->to the relative clause

The place where, The day when, The reason why
ex.:
The place where Mary kept a pig was the garden shed.
Tuesday was the day when Jake went to London to see Colin.
The reason why Jake went to London on Tuesday was to see Colin.

Verbs
ex.:
What she did was to scream.
What he does is write science fiction.
What I'll do is, I'll call John and ask his advice.

Whole Sentences
ex.:
What happened was (that) the car broke down.

Other structures
All (that) and expressions with thing can be used in cleft sentences.
ex.:
All I want is a house somewhere sunny.
The only thing I remember is a terrible pain in my head.
My trip to Thailand was definitely something.
It was not until I met you that I knew real happiness.
It was only when I read her letter that i realised what was happening.

Preparatory IT

It is I who/ It is me that

Phonetics

Vowels and diphthongs
iː - seat, feel
ɪ - sit, in
e - set, any
æ - sat, match
ɑː - march, after
ɒ - pot, gone
ɔː - port, law
ʊ - good, could
uː- food, group
ʌ - much, front
ɜː - turn, word
ə - away, collect, until
eɪ - take, wait
aɪ - mine, light
ɔɪ - oil, boy
əʊ - no, open
aʊ - house, now
ɪə - hear, deer
eə - air, where
ʊə - tour, endure

Nouns

You can sometimes identify a noun by looking at the end of a word.
Excellence, tradition, ability, instrument, significance are all examples of nouns that can be seen by their termination.
The problem with nouns is when it comes to usage and concordance. Countable and Uncountable nouns or the plural of some nouns can be tricky for beginners. Countable nouns can be counted (1,2,3,4...) whereas uncountable nouns have only one form.

• News, Success, all words that have only one form and are uncountable.
• Work, Travel, these are uncountable nouns with a close countable form. (job, trip/journey)
• Uncountable nouns can be broken up in countable words. (Money - pound/s, dollar/s, yen/s)
• There are some particular words that can itemise uncountable nouns. (a piece of news, three blades of grass)
• Some words are uncountable with one meaning and countable with another. (Wood as a tissue from the trees or a small forest.)
• Some words have a irregular plural form such as man-men, foot-feet, tooth-teeth.
• Organisations and companies are treated as collective nouns hence the use of the verb in the plural form. (NATO are, Coca Cola don't...)
• Nouns derived from foreign languages keep their same plural forms. (Mafioso-Mafiosi)

Pronunciation

• Nouns with a regular form simply have added S to their ends in their plural forms. When pronoucing these new words, we can either have an /s/, /z/ or /ɪz/ sound. Words that end in /ʤ/, /ʧ/or /ʃ/ will sound /ɪz/. Words that end in a voiced sound (like a humming in the throat) will have a /z/ sound for their plural form. Voiceless sound have a /s/ for plural and words with a /θ/ can end in either a /z/ or /s/ sound.

Make and Do

Some students of English usually mistake make for do and vice-versa.
According to the Practical English Usage by Michael Swan, do is used:

• to talk about an indefinite activity: "do something/ nothing/ anything."
• when referring to work or jobs: "do the ironing/ the painting/ your job/ the shopping"
• with ING forms and a determiner (the, much, my, some) in a sentence expressing hobbie or activity that takes a certain amount of time: "the talking/ some damage/ my washing"
• instead of make when the result of the action doesn't carry much importance (something ordinary.): "I'll do the dinner" instead of "I will make a fancy dinner for our guests."

Make on the other hand has a more limited use:

• when talking about a constructing, creating or building something: "I will make a house up the hill/ We made the perfect plan/ Let's make a cake".

Fixed Expressions

• do good, harm, business, a favor, sports, exercise, one's hair, 80km/h
• make arrangements, a journey, a suggestion, an offer, a decision, an attempt, an effort, an excuse, a phone call, a noise, a fortune, a profit, love, peace, war, one's bed, fire, progress.

I would say that for most of teh cases, we use do instead of make although there are plenty of exceptions.