Most english sentences are semantically ambiguous and can often be parsed in hundreds of different ways. And it's true that there is an element of reading comprehension. But a reasonable reader won't assume the thing about the cat.

We know this is occurring on a math exam, so it must be a logic puzzle. The exam-taker would've probably known this refers to a first-order logic question, and have been taught a certain way of translating sentences like this into first-order logic.

This is true of all word puzzles that they need to be mapped to math in a way that assumes knowledge about the world and context.