I think that when presenting a problem like this, it's not unreasonable to assume that the audience is capable of the abstract thinking that is needed to distill the underlying problem from the application in which it is presented.

Come to think of it, maybe I'd argue even stronger: when I was younger, I had a hard time understanding programming problems that were explained in terms of 'foo / bar' classes or function names. 'Applied' examples with cars and wheels made more sense, even if I could easily have come up with 'not every car has 4 wheels' counterarguments. Nowadays, I like foo / bar better, because they expose the problem directly, without an additional layer of real-world application, but only because I've gotten better at abstract reasoning.