1. .......... clerks screen timecards, compute pay by subtracting allotments from gross earnings, close out files when workers retire, resign, or transfer; and advise employees on income tax withholding and other mandatory deductions; finally, they prepare and mail earnings and tax-withholding statements for employees' use in preparing income tax returns.

2. The Index of .......... Production is a fixed-weight measure of the physical output of the nation's factories, mines, and utilities; one of the bigger wildcards in this report is utilities, which can be quite volatile due to swings in the weather.

3. Annuity .......... are the shares you own in variable annuity subaccounts during the period you're receiving income from the annuity; the number is fixed at the time that you buy the income annuity contract, or when you annuitize your deferred variable annuity.

4. A tax .......... is a 'statement of supplementary details'; more specifically, it is a form on which you provide information and complete calculations, so that you can transcribe the results onto another form.

5. The SEC scrapped the so-called .......... period rule, allowing companies poised to sell stock or bonds to promote the securities to investors; the Depression-era rule almost derailed Google Inc.'s $3.47 billion initial public offering in August after Playboy published an interview with the company's founders.

6. The NYSE set about clarifying the procedure by which members may acquire securities and pay their employees a commission for reselling them; last week an Exchange committee made ready to listen to the case of any member desiring to engage in the practice politely but correctly called ' .......... distribution'.

7. The rule is 'one-way': that is, fully .......... earnings per share should exclude those securities whose conversion, exercise, or other contingent issuance would have the effect of increasing the earnings per share amount.

8. China's central bank Sunday raised the amount banks must set aside in reserves, reducing the money available for lending, in the latest move to rein in the investment boom; the deposit reserve .......... will be raised by 0.5 percentage point to 11 percent starting on May 15, the People's Bank of China said.

9. The .......... pattern, also called the 'coil', appears in three varieties, ascending, descending, and symmetrical; converging trendlines of support and resistance give all three patterns their distinctive shape, and this occurs, Kahn explains, because "the trading action gets tighter and tighter until the market breaks out with great force."

10. The CFTC's market .......... program is intended to preserve the economic functions of futures and option markets by identifying situations that could pose a threat of manipulation and initiating preventive actions.