What number should come in place of the question mark below?

A man hijacks an aeroplane transporting both passengers(8 of them) and valuable cargo. After taking the cargo, the man demands nine parachutes, puts one of them on, and jumps, leaving the other eight behind. Why did he want eight?

Three ants are sitting at the three corners of an equilateral triangle. Each ant starts randomly picks a direction and starts to move along the edge of the triangle. What is the probability that none of the ants collide?

There are people and strange monkeys on this island, and you can not tell who is who (Edit: until you understand what they said - see below). They speak either only the truth or only lies.
Who are the following two guys?
A: B is a lying monkey. I am human.
B: A is telling the truth.

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?

You are given with the following sum. Each of the letters can be decoded as a digit. If we tell you that D = 5, then can you solve it entirely?

DONALD
+GERALD
=ROBERT

You have two strings whose only known property is that when you light one end of either string it takes exactly one hour to burn. The rate at which the strings will burn is completely random and each string is different. How do you measure 45 minutes?

A family is trapped in a jungle. There is a bridge which can lead them to safety. But at one time, the bridge can only allow two people to pass through. Also, all of them are afraid of the dark and thus, they can't go alone.

Father takes 1 minute to cross, the mother takes 2 minutes, the son takes 4 and the daughter takes 5 minutes. While crossing the time taken will be according to the slower one. How can they all reach the other side in the minimum possible time?

Two friends were stuck in a cottage. They had nothing to do and thus they started playing cards. Suddenly the power went off and Friend 1 inverted the position of 15 cards in the normal deck of 52 cards and shuffled it. Now he asked Friend 2 to divide the cards into two piles (need not be equal) with equal number of cards facing up. The room was quite dark and Friend 2 could not see the cards. He thinks for a while and then divides the cards in two piles.

On checking, the count of cards facing up is same in both the piles. How could Friend 2 have done it ?

Which digit occurred maximum times between the number 1 and 1000?