[originaltext] A new study has found that excessive alcohol drinking costs A

A new study has found that excessive alcohol drinking costs Americans more than 220 billion dollars a year. That amount is equal to almost two dollars a drink. But study organizers believe the biggest costs come from a loss of worker productivity.
    Robert Brewer works for America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a public health agency. He helped to produce a report on the study. The researchers used findings from 2006 to examine different costs linked to heavy drinking. They looked at results from around the United States and found a lot of variation in different parts of the country.
    Alcohol-related costs include health care, the cost of trying cases for drinking-related crimes and property damage from road accidents. Robert Brewer says the biggest cost is lost productivity. Many people with a drinking problem have lower-paying jobs. He says they may also be less productive when they are at work.
    "In addition to that, a number of people die of alcohol-attributable conditions, and many of those folks die in the prime of their life. So there is the personal tragedy there, but there is also a huge economic cost to somebody dying, for example, in an alcohol-related motor vehicle crash at age 35."
    The researchers were mainly concerned about the cost of heavy alcohol use. The study didn’t look at the effect on individuals who drink a glass of beer or wine with dinner. Mr. Brewer says the largest costs come from binge drinking when people drink a lot of alcohol in a short period of time. The study was based on the economic costs of heavy drinking in the United States. But Mr. Brewer says many nations have problems with what the World Health Organization calls "harmful use of alcohol".
    "But I think that it is very reasonable to assume that harmful alcohol use is gonna result in some of the same consequences in other countries, even if the cost associated with those consequences are different." The study on the economic costs of excessive alcohol use was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
    Two years ago, a British medical examiner ruled that singer Amy Winehouse died as a result of drinking too much alcohol. Winehouse was only 27 years old. Tests showed that she died after drinking enough alcohol to put her blood alcohol level at more than five times the legal drunk-driving limit. The award-winning singer had a well-documented battle with drugs and alcohol.
    I’m Christopher Cruise. Thank you for listening.
20. What do researchers believe to be the biggest alcohol-related cost?
21. What did Robert Brewer say about the "harmful use of alcohol"?
22. What do we learn about Amy Winehouse?