For the 53-year-old Jarvis, the new job represents the opportunity of a lifetime.

The selected jobs must represent as many departments as possible.

For a time, blacks had reason to believe that these jobs represented their best shots at the top.

Her new job, she said, "represented the opportunity for me to go back to something that I loved."

The seven jobs represent a quarter of the cases considered by Acoba so far this year.

For some, the job represents a free ticket to exotic places.

The 1,000 jobs to be cut represent 7.3 percent of the company's work force of 13,700.

Such jobs represented less than a third of the Ivy faculty in 1993 but climbed to 45 percent by 2003.

"These jobs are gone, and that represents a potentially significant slide in living standards."

Low-wage jobs represent an increasingly large proportion of the positions available to American workers.