Previous work demonstrates that information retrieval system performance in sensibly improved when using document passanges as the basic unit of information. However, the IR community has not yet arrived at consensus about the best way of defining text passages for retruevak purposes. This paper reports on experiments with eht IR-n system, an information retrieval system that applies a new method for passage selection. Passage are difined as a fixed number of adjoining senteces in a document. This approach has been tested for the monolingual (Spanish) and bilingual (Spanish English) taks at CLEF 2001 with different success fates