Creating and manipulating expressions and formulae

Janine noticed, while studying some cube numbers, that if you take three consecutive whole numbers and multiply them together and then add the middle number of the three, you get the middle number. Does this always work? Can you prove or disprove this conjecture?

My train left London between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. and arrived in Paris between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. At the start and end of the journey the hands on my watch were in exactly the same positions but the minute hand and hour hand had swopped places. What time did the train leave London and how long did the journey take?

Two motorboats travelling up and down a lake at constant speeds leave opposite ends A and B at the same instant, passing each other, for the first time 600 metres from A, and on their return, 400 metres from B. How long is the lake?

If the sides of the triangle in the diagram are 3, 4 and 5, what is the area of the shaded square?

What would you get if you continued this sequence of fraction sums? 1/2 + 2/1 = 2/3 + 3/2 = 3/4 + 4/3 =

Two semi-circles (each of radius 1/2) touch each other, and a semi-circle of radius 1 touches both of them. Find the radius of the circle which touches all three semi-circles.

If a two digit number has its digits reversed and the smaller of the two numbers is subtracted from the larger, prove the difference can never be prime.

Medieval stonemasons used a method to construct octagons using ruler and compasses... Is the octagon regular? Proof please.

A point moves around inside a rectangle. What are the least and the greatest values of the sum of the squares of the distances from the vertices?

Find some triples of whole numbers a, b and c such that a^2 + b^2 + c^2 is a multiple of 4. Is it necessarily the case that a, b and c must all be even? If so, can you explain why?