Do success and happiness depend on the choices people nake rather than on factors beyond their control?

You can only decide your fate. You can decide whether you want to ne happy and successful or not by it also determines on the decisions you make in your life. People always are making decisions anywhere they are but they aren't always good or bad. Everyone learns this from personal experience and it always wasn't such a great outcome. It happens everyday with people on the streets. An example is drinking and driving. People know they shouldn't do it yet they still take the risk. People that dont drink and drive end up getting home safely and the people that end up drinking while driving either crash from swerving or eventually get pulled over by the cops. You should be able to make good decisions for yourself.

Is it necessary to limit or put restrictions on freedom of thought and expression?

Okay, this topic really bothers me. Some people are arrested for speaking their own opinion about the autority or government yet our FIRST AMENDMEMT clearly states that we have a freedom of speech. Might as well be striped from our freedom is this is happening. BECAUSE how are people going to set amendments that give us our rights and discussing about our unalienable rights saying that it cannt be taken away from us yet so many people are put into jail for it. I don't think they should put a limit on the freedom of thought and expression because they have a mouth to speak what they choose of their choice. No one can stop them from speaking what they believe in.

Can books and stories about characters and events that are not real teach us anything useful?

I've always enjoyed reading books and they were about my favorite thing to do (besides playing soccer). I've been taught soooo many lessons from books and most were learned from my childhood. One book that really enlightened me when I was a child was "the little engine that could." This book is still sold in stores and I'm very glad that it is. I read this book when i was in first grade or kindergarden. This book told me, "Alfonso, it doesn't who you are, what you look like, or where your background is from. You can do whatever you want as long as you put effort." I realized this later on as soon as I aged and read the book again. It was one of the most inspiring books to me.

Write about the ponderings of the teenage brain

The teenage brain think in many different ways depending on your past experience with everyone and everything. For example I believe all teenagers ponder sleep. Everyone wants sleep and that's a great thing to get but some teenagers think that they don't need sleep and are party animals that stay up all night. Another thing EVERYONE wants, including teenagers, is money. Money runs the world and it is like gasoline to teenagers. They run on it and that's all they want because they always want all the hip/cool stuff and always want the best phones, clothes, etc. One last thing I believe teenagers want is sex. Yes, sex. Almost every teenager wants to experiment with it to see how it feels and how "great" it really is. Teenagers are just curious to try new things because they are always curious in what is "cool" to do now so yeah, that's my point.

Can knowledge be burden rather than a benefit?

Having a lot of knowledge is always a great thing to have because people will always know more information about a certain topic which can give them a great advantage for when handling certain problems in the future. Although, knowing to much seems like a burden to some and this is why. If some people have too much knowledge they will start believing that they know everything and that they have the answer to every question you have. We are all human, you aren't able to know everything, you will forget things. Even if a person has great memory they will eventually forget something from time to time. They aren't able to remember everything.

Is knowledge of the past no longer useful for us today?

This is not true because past knowledge is always helpful in any situation. Everyone learns from experience and people use that past experience to make sure that they don't make that same mistake they've made before. Am example is if someone scores poorly on an exam that was very important. Maybe they just didn't study or wasn't really serious about it. They should learn next time to study or actually put effort into their test so that they won't score poorly. Past knowledge is always an upper hand to have in any situation.