Ambiguity

Last week one of our vocabulary words was 'ambiguous' in TOEFL 1. I used the following example, inspired by Mitch Hedburg:

Moi:"Hyun-il, have you ever ridden a bicycle or killed a man?"
H-i:"..................Yes, but I -"
Moi:"Nonono. It's a yes or no question."
H-i: [pained expression] "Yes."

For the next class we discussed the passive voice and I explained the idea of distancing language and we returned to the topic of Hyun-il's dark side.

Active: Hyun-il killed a man with chopsticks. [I got sidetracked explaining that it is unclear if he killed a man *using* chopsticks as the murder weapon or if the man had chopsticks at the time of his demise.]

Passive: Hyun-il was the person who killed the man holding the chopsticks.

My passive examples weren't that great but I was having a lot of fun. I should stop teasing Hyun-il (he's a good kid and is easy going, which is why I tend to make him the subject). He was also the subject of an entire paragraph in a quiz yesterday wherein I continued the saga of his attempts to get a date with a girl in his physics class. In previous quizzes he has had to cancel dates because I gave him study hall or whatever so I cut him some slack in this quiz and they got to study together and it turns out she can explain both Einstein's Theory of Relativity and String Theory.