Here’s the distilled prompt:

According to the author, what do laws and manners have in common?

How do you get there? Well for starters, when a question stem doesn’t fit cleanly into any of the categories you’ve come to recognize, it’s especially important to read it closely to make sure you’re clear on its exact meaning. This stem tells us:

1. The stimulus will make a comparison between two things.
2. Our job is to capture the precise nature of that comparison.

So this is kinda like an MSS question in that the correct answer must be supported by the stimulus – it can’t introduce new concepts or say anything inaccurate.

With such a specific task, it might even be worthwhile (though certainly not necessary) to peek down at the answer choices first to see how they differ from one another. In this instance, all our answers come in the form of “As with manners, laws are [like this],” which narrows our focus to the distilled prompt at the top of this section.

Once you’ve read the stem thoughtfully, the stimulus boils down to this:

Manners are [this way] and laws are also [this way].

I’ve helped a bit with the highlighting – grammatically, those highlighted clauses are the ones we need to compare. All that’s left is to paraphrase them both in a way that emphasizes what they have in common. Here it is:

Anticipation: We abide by [manners / laws] not because of penalties, but because cultural customs make deviance unthinkable.