2 . 听下面一段独白，根据听到的内容完成填空。

Hello, everyone, I am Marlin Cathlina, a broadcaster of the     1     "Making the Nations". Today I'd like to share something about European Union with you.

The European Union is an     2     of European countries. The countries are     3     countries that are governed in different ways. In the United Kingdom, for     4    , the head of state is a king or a queen. In France, on the other hand, the head of state is a     5    .

But each of them sends their own representatives to the European Parliament, which has some     6     over what happens in each of the member countries. The idea of the European Union     7     in the 1950s. The first members were France, Germany, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands and     8    .

The number increased rapidly during the second half of the     9     century. By the year 2000, there were 15 member countries. In 2004, the European Union increased to 25 members. The expanded European Union has a population of more than half a billion people,     10     as big as the population of the United States.