Combining Sentences About Things

When two sentences share the same thing or object, you can join them using which or that. Take these two sentences: "I bought a car. It has a sunroof." The word "it" refers to "car," so replace it with which: "I bought a car which has a sunroof." The relative clause "which has a sunroof" gives extra detail about the car. You can also say "I bought a car that has a sunroof" — both are equally correct.

Word order matters when combining sentences. The relative clause must go directly after the noun it describes. "The film won three awards. It was released last year" becomes "The film which was released last year won three awards" — the clause goes after "film," not after "awards." When the thing is the object of the relative clause, you can sometimes leave out the pronoun entirely: "The book which I read" = "The book I read." This is very common in spoken English and is tested frequently in Cambridge B1 and B2 exams.