Along with tackling pressure, athletes must also focus on self-confidence, which is the number-one variable for impacting high-level performance.

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Hitman: Absolution has twenty levels, made up of a variable number of individual segments, which should give you twenty hours of gameplay.

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With this sort of contract, the owner of a big, highly appreciated stock position gets an upfront payment from an investment firm--typically for 75% to 85% of the value of his shares--in exchange for agreeing to deliver a variable number of shares or cash in the future, with the exact amount dependent on how the stock performs.

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Calculating the addition of the number 2 to a variable, for example, can generate 27 instructions in machine code, many of them repetitive.

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Genworth Financial (33, GNW) is the largest U.S. seller of long-term-care insurance and variable annuities, number four for term life and number five for mortgage insurance.

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The single strongest variable in Google rankings is the number and authority of sites that link to a posting.

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The number of tornadoes overall seems to be more variable.

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This number is perhaps 100 times more important than any other variable.

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We are able to do only a number of days out at a time because the winds are so variable this time of year.

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We then assigned each level of performance a number from zero to 10. (The highest one-tenth in each category received a 10, the second tenth a 9, and so on.) The higher the number, we assumed, the more pain that industry would suffer with respect to that specific variable.

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