Question 3: Select out the phrase that has a gerund in it. Yet within…

Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
In December 1993, my sister and parents arrived as refugees in Hamilton, Ontario. In the first couple of months, my parents attended English-language courses, while Kristina worked at Taco Bell, a purveyor of fast “ethnic” food, which she preferred to refer to as Taco Hell. Things were very complicated for them, what with the language my parents couldn’t speak, the generic shock of displacement, and a cold climate that was extremely unfriendly to randomly warm human interactions. For my parents, finding a job was a frightening operation of major proportions, but Hamilton is a steel-mill town teeming with job-hungry immigrants, where many of the natives are first-generation Canadians and therefore friendly, and supportive of their new compatriots. Soon enough, my parents did find work—Father at a steel mill, Mother as a superintendent in a large apartment building, in which many of the tenants were foreign-born.
Yet within months, my parents started cataloguing the differences between us and them—we being Bosnians or ex-Yugoslavs, they being purely Canadian. That list of differences, theoretically endless, included items such as sour cream (our sour cream—mileram—was creamier and tastier than theirs); smiles (they smile, but don’t really mean it); babies (they do not bundle up their babies in severe cold); wet hair (they go out with their hair wet, foolishly exposing themselves to the possibility of lethal brain inflammation); clothes (their clothes fall apart after you wash them a few times), et cetera. My parents, of course, were not the only ones obsessing over the differences. Indeed, their social life at the beginning of their Canadian residence largely consisted of meeting people from the old country and exchanging and discussing the perceived dissimilarities. Once I listened to a family friend in what could fairly be called astonishment as he outlined a substratum of differences proceeding from his observation that we like to simmer our food for a long time (sarma, cabbage rolls, being a perfect example), while they just dip it in extremely hot oil and cook it in a blink. Our simmering proclivities were reflective of our love of eating and, by extension and obviously, of our love of life. On the other hand, they didn’t really know how to live, which pointed at the ultimate, transcendental difference—we had soul, and they were soulless. The fact that—even if the food-preparation analysis made any sense—they did not love committing atrocities either and that we were at the center of a brutal, bloody war, which under no circumstances could be construed as love of life, didn’t at all trouble the good analyst.
Excerpted from: Hemon, Aleksandar. The Book of My Lives. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

Select out the phrase that has a gerund in it. Yet within months,/ my parents/ started cataloguing/ the differences between us and them.