[Geopandas 0.7][1] added a new `rows` parameter to `read_file`. You can use it to read the first n rows, or a specific slice of rows.

```
import geopandas as gpd

# Read the first 100 rows
gdf = gpd.read_file("/path/to/my/shapefile.shp", rows=100)

# Read 5 rows from the 100000th
gdf = gpd.read_file("/path/to/my/shapefile.shp", rows=slice(100000, 100005))

```

  [1]: https://geopandas.org/docs/user_guide/io.html#row-filter