Explain the meaning of the word apace as it is used in the opening paragraph of the passage.(5 marks)

Now that my own children are teenagers and I work in a university in a large city,I can go for weeks without properly interacting with a child. This miserable and unnatural state of being is in part because the society I live in is WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic). But the dramatic and near-universal decline in birth rate and family size that has been one of the most pervasive social changes of the past two centuries,and that continues apace around the world,means that my situation is far from unusual.