In a Chance magazine article (Summer 2005), Danielle Vasilescu and Howard Wainer used data from the United Nations Center for Human Settlements to investigate aspects of living conditions for several countries. Among the variables they looked at were the country's per capita gross domestic product (GDP, in $) and Crowdedness, defined as the average number of persons per room living in homes there. This scatterplot displays these data for 56 countries:

a) Explain why you should re-express these data before trying to fit a model.
b) What re-expression of GDP would you try as a starting point?