1 . It is the stock response to a parent struggling with a crying baby or a bad-tempered teenager: “Treasure every moment because they grow up so fast.” Now researchers have found there may be something in the old saying. Watching children grow up really does seem to make time fly. Scientists have found that parents feel time passing more quickly than non-parents.

The findings could be due to the fact that children change fast. “Over ten years, children go through dramatic changes not only in their physical appearance, but also in their understanding abilities and their status, ” the researchers said. The results could also be a consequence of parents spending a large amount of their time on their children, they said, even though they found no difference in the time pressures recorded by parents compared with non-parents in the study.

For the study, published in the journal Timing & Time Perception (感知), the researchers asked 431 people aged from 20 to 59 to fill in a subjective time questionnaire, a tool used by psychologists to measure time perception. They were asked: “How fast did the last ten years pass for you?” An answer of very slowly gave a score of-2; slowly was-I; neither fast nor slow was 0; fast was I and very fast scored 2. So the higher the score, the faster they felt time had passed. The parents had an average score of I. 22, compared with 0. 76 for the non-parents.

Participants were also asked how quickly the last year, month and week had passed, but there were no differences between the groups for these shorter intervals (间隔). Previous studies have suggested that time also seems to speed up when we get older. Research published in 2019 by Duke University in North Carolina suggests this could be due to physical changes in our bodies, with a slowdown in image processing speeding up our perception of time passing.

Days that seemed to last forever in our youth were “not due to experiences being much deeper or meaningful”, the researcher Adrian Bejan said, “but due to the fact that they were being processed rapidly.”

1. What probably makes parents feel time passing more quickly than non-parents?

A．The pressure of raising children.	B．Devoting much time to children.
C．The slowdown in image processing.	D．Noticing children’s daily physical growth.

2. What can be inferred from the text?

A．Time seems to speed up for the young.

B．Parents responded differently to the old saying.

C．Non-parents have deeper experiences.

D．The older people are, the higher scores they may get.

3. What does the underlined word “they” in the last paragraph refer to?

A．Experiences.

B．Researchers.

C．Days.

D．Youths.

4. What’s the best title for the text?

A．The perception of time passing.

B．Teenagers experience dramatic changes.

C．Time really flies when you are having children.

D．Comparison between parents and non-parents.