Previous work demonstrates that information retrieval system performance is sensibly improved when using document passages 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 retrieval purposes. This paper reports on experiments with the IR-n system, an information retrieval system that applies a new method for passage selection. Passages are defined as a fixed number of adjoining sentences in a document. This approach has been tested for the monolingual (Spanish) and bilingual (Spanish-English) tasks at CLEF-2001 with different success rates.