hello, any response to this question pls?

Sometimes, we gain knowledge not only from simply posting
OA's but also from exchanging ideas over what your opinions
are to a question....

I strongly go with first option..

Read the complete sentence with option 2,

A research conducted at the university of California reports that there is a direct
link between the price of a pack of cigarettes and how likely a teenager will be to start smoking.

Follow the parallelism rules--

Between X ... And Y-- X and Y must be parallel

here between is followed by a noun " the price" .. so "and" should be followed by noun form only.. i.e "likelihood" which is correctly written in case of option 1.

So option 2 is not parallel with the construction -- by use of "how likely".

Hope it helps.

As mentioned by Naveen, parallelism is maintained in A. A is correct here.

If B had to be used, the sentence should have been...
A research conducted at the university of California reports that there is an direct
link between how the pack of cigarettes will be priced and how likely a teenager will be to start smoking.

the AN in bold is an incorrect article in the sentence.
Could you please post the entire question for further analysis? Thanks!