Abstract
In Japan and Taiwan, English is one of the main subjects included in the entrance examinations, which a majority of high school students are required to take to apply for admission to a higher level of education. And the national unified exam (NUE) is administered once a year to all or many of those planning to enter the universities. This paper is concerned with probing into the peculiar nature inherent in each nation's latest NUE English test with a special focus on the reading comprehension sections. For this purpose, the readability of the English passages in the reading section of each NUE English test will be compared. The 'Flesch Score' is a powerful estimate of the level of difficulty in comprehending that the test takers have experienced, and measures readability based on the average numbers of words per sentence and of syllables per 100 words. 'JACET Basic Vocabulary 4000' can also provide other useful information to analyze vocabulary in each reading passage. Utilizing these two, we find that there are not any statistically significant differences in either the average number of syllables per 100 words or the difficulty of the vocabulary used. However, the average numbers of words per sentence are clearly different between the two nations.
