Can you replace the question mark with the correct number?

Find the next number in the series

12, 20, 40, 72, 116, 172 ?

10 people came into a hotel with 9 rooms and each guest wanted his own room. The bellboy solved this problem.
He asked the tenth guest to wait for a little with the first guest in room number 1. So in the first room, there were two people. The bellboy took the third guest to room number 2, the fourth to number 3, ..., and the ninth guest to room number 8. Then he returned to room number 1 and took the tenth guest to room number 9, still vacant.
How can everybody have his own room?

John was so frustrated to be the suspect of being a sleeper terrorist that he shoot himself right between the eyes with a revolver in his toilet. The revolver and the bullets were accurate. Minutes later John walks out of the toilet unharmed.
How can this be possible?

A new clothing store has a unique method of pricing items. A vest costs $20, a tie costs $15, a blouse costs $30, and underwear costs $45. How much would pants cost?

My cousin lives in one story house in Antarctica. His house is made the of-of sandstone. what is the color of stairs?

Assume the given figure to be a delicious doughnut. Yes, now you can concentrate more on the puzzle. So you have this delicious doughnut in your refrigerator when your friends come knocking at the door. There are eight of them. Now you have to make three cuts in this doughnut so that each one of you nine people can enjoy a piece of it. Neither you nor your friends would mind the size of their piece as long as they are getting it. How will you do it?

You stand in front of two doors. A guard stands next to each door. You know the following things: one path leads to paradise, the other leads to death. You cannot distinguish between the two doors. You also know that one of the two guards always tells the truth and the other always lies. You have permission to ask one guard one question to discover which door leads to paradise. What one question would you ask to guarantee you enter the door to paradise?

There is a circular car race track of 10km. There are two cars, Car A and Car B. And they are at the exact opposite end to each other. At Time T(0), Both cars move toward each other at a constant speed of 100 m/seconds. As we know both cars are at the same speed they will always be the exact opposite to each other.
Note, at the center, there is a bug which starts flying towards Car A at time T(0). When the bug reaches car B, it turns back and starts moving towards the car A. The speed of bug is 1m/second. After 5 hours all three stop moving.
What is the total distance covered by the bug?

A maths symbol is hidden in the below Bar Graph. Can you decipher it?