I looked up the man page and couldn't find how long dnsmasq cache a dns. what's the rule for caching and expiration?

I am having a problem that request send to an external service sometimes takes over 5 or 10 seconds for namelookup. I could save the external service ip to /etc/hosts but I am afraid of ip change. Installing Dnsmasq improves name lookup but slow namelookup still happens with less frequency.

One solution is to setup a simple ping in cron job but I need to find out the expiration time first.

thanks.

UPDATE

added dig output

; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> api.mch.weixin.qq.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 45012
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;api.mch.weixin.qq.com.             IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
api.mch.weixin.qq.com.      0       IN      A       140.207.69.102

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Fri Jul 17 19:24:36 2015
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 55

UPDATE 2

the previous dig output contains TTL as 0 which is misleading. I have posted another dig output.

; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> api.mch.weixin.qq.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 60900
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;api.mch.weixin.qq.com.             IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
api.mch.weixin.qq.com.      181     IN      CNAME   forward.qq.com.
forward.qq.com.             181     IN      A       101.226.90.149
forward.qq.com.             181     IN      A       101.226.129.200

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Tue Jul 21 12:01:54 2015
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 99