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  3. Nearly all cultures have a version of the arrow of time, a process by which they move towards the future and away from the past.

Nearly all cultures have a version of the arrow of time, a process by which they move towards the future and away from the past.

admin2018-07-10  49
问题     Nearly all cultures have a version of the arrow of time, a process by which they move towards the future and away from the past. According to a paper to be published in Psychological Science this has an interesting psychological effect. A group of researchers, led by Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago, found that people judge the distance of events differently, depending on whether they are in the past or future.
    The paper calls this the "Temporal Doppler Effect". In physics, the Doppler effect describes the way that waves change frequency depending on whether their source is traveling towards or away from you. Mr Caruso argues that something similar happens with people’s perception of time. Because future events are associated with diminishing distance, while those in the past are thought of as receding, something happening in one month feels psychologically closer than something that happened a month ago.
    This idea was tested in a series of experiments. In one, researchers asked 323 volunteers and divided them into two groups. A week before Valentine’s day, members of the first were asked how they planned to celebrate it. A week after February 14th the second group reported how they had celebrated it. Both groups also had to describe how near the day felt on a scale of one to seven. Those describing forthcoming plans were more likely to report it as feeling "a short time from now", while those who had already experienced it tended to cluster at the "a long time from now" end of the scale. To account for the risk that recalling actual events requires different cognitive functions than imagining ones that have not yet happened, they also asked participants to rate the distance of hypothetical events a month in the past or future. The asymmetry remained.
    Interestingly, the effect can be reversed by manipulating time’s arrow. In another experiment, participants were plugged into a virtual reality machine, with some moving forwards along a tree-lined street others backwards. Those who were moving backwards reported that past events began to feel closer.
    Mr Caruso speculates that his research has implications for psychological well-being. He suspects that people who do not show this bias—those who feel the past as being closer—might be more subject to depression, because they are more likely to dwell on past events. There may also be lessons for politicians and business leaders. Talking of future plans may be more effective than boasting about past successes. "People want to know what are you going to do for me next, not what have you done for me lately," suggests Mr Caruso.
According to Paragraph 3, which of the following is true of the experiments?
选项 A、Members of the second group have generally forgotten the details about Valentine’s day.
B、Members of the first group show better sense of time than those of the second group.
C、Members of the second group present worse abilities in cognition and imagination.
D、Members of the first group are likely to report at the opposite end of the scale to the second group.
答案D
解析 根据题干可直接定位到第三段。该段介绍了科研人员的实验。在实验过程中，人们要对同样远近的一周按照1～7的范围标注不同程度的距离感。该段⑥句用while引导的并列句，表明两组人之间的对比：第一组人认为是“a short time from now”；第二组人认为是“a long time from now”。两组人的观点形成很大的反差，由此可知两组的距离值应当是相反的两端，因此D项正确。
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