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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.

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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 1, the arrow of time may have an impact on _____.
选项 A、the process of almost all cultures when moving forward
B、people’s judge of the distance of certain events
C、men’s comprehension of events in the future
D、people’s memory of things happened in the past
答案B
解析 根据题干可直接定位到第一段。该段①句首先提出arrow of time的概念，并在②句指出这(this)会产生有趣的心理效应，最后一句则借研究的结论指出具体的心理效应：人们对事件距离的判断，往往取决于该事件发生在过去还是未来(judge the distance…depending on…)，即①句中的arrow of time产生了③句中的现象，故可推知，arrow of time会影响人们对事件距离的判断，B项所述与此一致，故为本题答案。
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