OK Tim thanks for the answers, I appreciate your patience with me [even though I "lack programming skills" :) ]
The one answer of yours that still does not make sense to me is that arm actually means Kbytes/sec and not kbits/sec when it writes Kb/s
I have arm reporting average of at least several tens of Kb/s all the time, and about 100 Kb/s most of the time, and then I wind up with almost constant 200 bit/sec actual average rate over 6 hours, based on the total number of Mbytes sent that Tor reports in its log file.
Even if the 200 bit/sec figure is somehow rounded to 8000 bit/ sec or even 8000 bytes/sec as you suggested , this does not make sense...
Rana