Collocations: do, play or go with sports and other activities

In British English, you can "do sport". In American English you can "play sports".

A typical mistake Spanish speakers make is using the verb practise for sports:

*I love practising sport. This should be: I love sport.

*I usually practise sport every evening. This should be: I usually do sport every evening.

However, in American English you can use the verb practise or practice (as it is spelt there) to mean "to train": The team is practicing for tomorrow's competition.

When other words related to sports are used, we may use other verbs:
"What sports do you do?"
"I play tennis".
Observe these pictures:

Go skiing	Do karate	Play tennis

There are three verbs that collocate with sports and other free time activities: go, do and play, but they are not interchangeable:

• Go is used with activities and sports that end in -ing. The verb go here implies that we go somewhere to practice this sport: go swimming.
• Do is used with recreational activities and with individual, non-team sports or sports in which a ball is not used, like martial arts, for example: do a crossword puzzle, do athletics, do karate.
• Play is generally used with team sports and those sports that need a ball or similar object (puck, disc, shuttlecock...). Also, those activities in which two people or teams compete against each other: play football, play poker, play chess.

In this table there is a list of sports and activities that collocate with these verbs:

Go	Do	Play
riding	aerobics	badminton
jogging	gymnastics	table-tennis
hitch-hiking	taekwondo	football
fishing	judo	basketball
sailing	karate	chess
windsurfing	kung-fu	cricket
skiing	ballet	board games
snowboarding	exercise	snooker
swimming	yoga	hockey
dancing	athletics	baseball
skating	archery	rugby
cycling	a crossword puzzle	volleyball
running	tai chi	squash

Some exceptions to the rules:

• You use do with three activities that end in -ing: do boxing, do body-building and do weight-lifting because they don't imply moving along as the other activities ending in -ing.
• Golf: if there is an idea of competition, you use the verb play. However, you can say go golfing if you do it for pleasure: Tiger Woods plays golf. We'll go golfing at the weekend. 

Tiger Woods
Image

Now try doing these exercises:

• Easy
• Choose the correct verb

Collocations: make and do

Do and make are two verbs with similar meanings, and sometimes it's difficult to choose one or the other.

Make often expresses the idea of creation:

Let's make a cake!

Do is used to talk about an activity without saying exactly what it is.

What are you doing?

Do is always used with something, anything, everything, nothing...

Come on, boys, do something!

http://awfullibrarybooks.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Things-to-Make-and-Do-1.jpg

In other cases there are no clear rules. We have to learn the different collocations.

A collocation is a combination of two or more words that happens very often in a language. These words are generally used together. For example, in English you can say: “I like strong tea”, where “strong tea” is a collocation, because both words tend to appear together. It's not usual to see a synonym for “strong” instead of this word: “powerful tea” cannot be said. So, language learners should try to use the correct collocations if they want to sound natural when speaking a foreign language.

That's what happens with do and make: we have to learn the collocations in which they appear. These are the most important:

DO		MAKE
one's duty	the housework	sure	an offer
good	harm	arrangements	a suggestion
business	one's best	a mistake	a phone call
a favour	research	an appointment	sense
the shopping	the washing-up	a promise	the most of...
the dishes	the homework	love	war

Have a look at this presentation and do the exercises at the end of it:


 Now you can do these exercises to see how much you have learnt:

• Fill in the gaps with make or do 1
• Fill in the gaps with make or do 2
• Choose the correct answer