When we are children, the summer holidays seem to last forever, and the wait between Spring Festivals feels like an eternity. But later, we may find that the time just seems to fly by, with weeks, months and entire seasons disappearing from a blurred calendar at a fast speed. Why does time seem to pass faster as we get older?

According to the Daily Mail, our brains degrade as we get older. That diminish the amount of information we can deal with in a single day. “The human mind senses time changing when the perceived images change,” Adrian Bejan from Duke University, US, told the Daily Mail. “The present is different from the past because the mental viewing has changed, not because somebody’s clock rings.”

Infants, for example, move their eyes much more often than adults because they’re processing images at a faster rate. They deal with a large amount of information and do many things in a single day. This makes them feel like a single day lasts for a long time. However, as people get older, fewer images are processed in the same amount of time. Therefore, older people receive less information during a day than younger people. This causes things to seem as though they’re happening more quickly.

Apart from the degradation of our brains, some psychological reasons also make us experience time differently. People may measure time by the number of memorable events that can be recalled within a certain period. When we think about our youth, we may remember a life packed with first-time activities, for example, our first time traveling without our parents, or our first date. We experienced these events so vividly that time then seems to us to have passed very slowly. According to David Eagleman of the Baylor College of Medicine in the US, recalling these memories makes us feel like they took forever. Many adults find life is routine and sometimes dull. For this reason, when they look back, they might feel like there are not many exciting things to remember. Therefore, time seems to be moving faster to them.

【小题1】What does the underlined word “diminish” in the second paragraph probably mean?

A．get worse	B．stay unchanged
C．go up	D．cut down

【小题2】According to the third paragraph, which statement is true?

A．Infants and adults process information in different ways.

B．The more information people process per day, the quicker time seems to be.

C．How much information people deal with varies with age.

D．Adults can hardly deal with any information.

【小题3】What can we infer from David Eagleman’s words?

A．Youth is the best time to enjoy some first time activities.

B．Young people’s lives are much more interesting than older.

C．childhood memories are too precious to forget.

D．psychological reasons make us experience time differently.

【小题4】What is the main purpose of this passage?

A．To tell us that life passes by quickly for adults.

B．To explain why life speeds up when we grow older.

C．To show us that adults’ lives are not as exciting as children.

D．To introduce us the difference between adults and children.