The attached article from the San Francisco Chronicle, January 27, 1996, describes very serious problems of subsidence, water supply, and environmental pollution that exist today in Mexico City. A stratum of very soft, very high water content clay is the source of most of the settlements that accompanies the pumping of water from the underlying aquifer systems. The clay stratum thickness averaged 24 m (79 ft) in 1936, and had an average water content (w) of 356 %. The soil solids have a specific gravity (G_s) of 2.65. The average settlement of 6.7 m (22 ft) during the 60 year period referred to in the newspaper article has been uniform across the city. Thus, it can be reasonably assumed that all of the clay compression has resulted from one-dimensional consolidation: that is, all the movements have been in the vertical direction. The Mexico City clay is fully saturated (S_r = 100%). What was the average water content of the clay stratum in 1996?