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

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?

In order to complete the racing competition, the Mexico racetrack has to submit its top and the most famous three horses to win the competition. Due to an electrical storm, all the records are cleared and no one knows which horse holds the record. They all look identical and it becomes even more difficult to differentiate the horses. There are 25 horses in the Mexico racetrack. But there can be only five horses at a time on the track. What will the least number of races that can be conducted to find out the three fastest horses?

Use only one mathematical symbol and all numbers (0-9) to get a sum of 99

In a science lab, a petri dish hosts a healthy colony of yeast for an experiment. Now every minute, all the yeast cells divide into two. At noon, there was just a single cell of yeast and at 1:22, the Petri dish was half full. Can you calculate when the dish will be full of yeast?

One day, I thought of ways that can be used for creating a palindrome. So I decided that I will turn into a larger number by adding the reversed digits to the original number and keep doing it till I finally obtained a palindrome.

I am not sure if this process will always result in a palindrome eventually but I was able to produce a four-digit palindrome. Can you guess my starting number?

My sock drawer has 26 blue socks, 13 pink socks, 33 green socks, and 12 red socks, how many socks would I have to pull out in the dark to be sure I had a matching pair?

Can you find a pattern and the missing number in the series given below?

100, 155, 258,? , 584, 819.

A devotee visits 9 temples when he visits India. All these nine temples have one thing in common - there are 100 steps in every temple. The devotee puts the Re.1 coin after climbing up every step. He does the same while climbing down every step. At each temple, the devotee offers half of his money from his pocket to god. In this way, his pocket becomes empty after he visits the 9th temple.

Can you calculate the total amount he had initially?

John has played 50 ODI's and his average is 50. How many runs should he score in his 51st ODI, so that his average score jumps to 51?