If the testing company is right, this year's gain would evaporate.

There was also a rally after the market hit bottom last Sept. 21, but those gains have now evaporated.

The big question was whether the gains made by employees in their grab for balance would evaporate in the new reality.

These gains are tentative and will certainly evaporate if the states lose momentum.

Meanwhile, privatization had run amok, because "the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated.

But its biggest daily gain - an almost 1 percent jump on Thursday, when the German Finance Minister resigned - evaporated on Friday.

The gains of the 1980's boom may have evaporated so quickly because of crack cocaine.

There has also been more emphasis on training teachers, on improving the lowest-performing schools and on improving middle schools, where educational gains often evaporate.

Early yesterday the price of the 30-year bond rose as much as 11/32 as stocks fell, but the gains evaporated as stocks rebounded.

All the fantastic gains of 1987, and some of 1986's, had evaporated in a selling frenzy that reduced the value of investors' stock portfolios by about a trillion dollars.