CSS nth-child for greater than and less than

Question

In my HTML I have,

Answer 1

If it's just 1 and 2 you don't want the style applied to you can do something like this instead:

.container {
    background: yellow;
}

.container:first-child,
.container:first-child + .container {
    background: transparent;
}

The yellow background will apply to every container except for the first child and the one following it.