2, 3, 5, 9, 17, _ What is the next number in the sequence?

Client Dempsey living in one of the East Coast states of the U.S. was talking to Landon Donovan, who was living in the West Coast state of the U.S.

Dempsey: What time is it?
Donovan: Wow, It is the same time here.

How is this possible?

There was a blind man. He had four socks in his drawer either black or white. He opened it and took out two socks. Now the probability that it was a pair of white socks is 1/2.

Can you find out the probability that he had taken out a pair of black socks ?

Christina is practising her dance steps along with her friends. In a particular sequence, all of them form a row. At that point, Niharika is standing in the 4th position from either end of the row.
Can you find out how many girls are practising together?

When it is alive we sing, when it is dead we clap our hands. What is it?

There are are five things wrong with this sentence; only geniuses will be able to to spot all of the mitstakes

A river should be crossed by a father, a mother and their two sons and two daughters.
There are some rules that should be followed while crossing the river. There can be only two people in the raft while crossing. The daughters cannot be with their father unless there is the presence of the mother. The sons cannot be with their mothers unless the father is present. Unless the guard is on the board, the criminals cannot be with any of the family members. Only the adults like the father, the guard, and the mother knows to use the raft.

How will they cross the river?

There are three boxes of different sizes with three cupcakes inside each of the boxes in Christina's kitchen. At night her daughter wakes up and goes to the kitchen. She opens a box and eats all three cakes.

But in the morning Christina finds out that each box still had three cupcakes. How?

I go up and I go down.
I go up towards the beautiful sky and down toward the green ground.
I am present tense.
I am past tense too
Children love me.

Who Am I?

A swan sits at the center of a perfectly circular lake. At an edge of the lake stands a ravenous monster waiting to devour the swan. The monster can not enter the water, but it will run around the circumference of the lake to try to catch the swan as soon as it reaches the shore. The monster moves at 4 times the speed of the swan, and it will always move in the direction along the shore that brings it closer to the swan the quickest. Both the swan and the the monster can change directions in an instant.
The swan knows that if it can reach the lake's shore without the monster right on top of it, it can instantly escape into the surrounding forest.

How can the swan successfully escape?