I guess it annoys me because I suspect that if this is the sort of borderline incoherence one must wade through I would probably score below average.

Or just average. There's contextual dependencies in most speech, and (as displayed in this subthread) not every speaker of a language has the same context. It's a fallacy to think that if you lack context for one of the examples, you will automatically score less than average -- other people may miss context for things obvious to you.