The bulk of the corpus analyzed in this study consists of parts of the Daily Yomiuri from 1989 to 2001 (about 25000 articles). The choice to use a newspaper is based on the assumption that it includes more words related to finance, business and economy covering a broad range of topics in the TOEIC test rather than a different genre such as the novel, and the Daily Yomiuri is the only Japanese newspaper which is available for non-commercial research purposes. Our reading material was constructed by the following steps (see Utiyama et al. 2004. for more details on how to create materials).