English · Chapter 38
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
"Hobbies" is a Language Development unit of the NEB Grade 12 Compulsory English textbook (2076 curriculum). Like the other units of this kind, it is organised around a theme rather than a literary text. Students read a text on the theme, answer comprehension questions, work on theme-related vocabulary, practise a grammar point, take part in a listening or speaking activity and finish with a writing task. The theme is hobbies: the activities people do regularly in their free time for pleasure rather than for money. The reading text is the essay "On Walking", which presents walking as a hobby and, more unusually, as a way of thinking.
"On Walking" is a reflective essay in praise of walking. It does not treat walking merely as physical exercise but as a pastime that shapes the way a person thinks, notices and lives. Read as a Grade 12 text, the essay develops several connected ideas.
The first idea is that walking is the simplest and most democratic of hobbies. It needs no equipment, no club, no partner and no special ground. A person needs only a pair of legs, a road and a little free time, so the pleasure of walking is open to the rich and the poor alike. Other hobbies cost money or depend on other people; walking asks for nothing except the willingness to step out of the door.
The second and central idea is the link between walking and thinking. The essayist observes that the steady rhythm of the body sets the mind free. A walker is not occupied with the hands or the eyes in the way a driver, a reader or a player is, so thoughts come and go easily. Problems that feel heavy at a desk grow lighter on the road, and ideas arrange themselves without effort. The essay suggests that a walk with no fixed purpose is often the most fruitful, because the mind is allowed to wander as freely as the feet.