As you can see, it has sliced along axis 0, the first axis. A slice, therefore, selects a range of elements along an axis. It can be helpful to read the expression arr2d[:2] as "select the first two rows of arr2d."
Slices follow a similar logic than indexing in NumPy array's. array[:2]
selects a range of elements along a single axis,, but array[:2, 1:]
does it along two axis.