Can 'not passive' be substituted with 'quite active' in this context?

Question

I'm a student learning English as a foreign language. Recently my school held an English test and one of questions has caused controversy between students and teachers. The question is:

Choose the word that is contextually correct among the highlighted words.

(...) The notion of 'addressivity' follow from the fact that people are quite active in their conversations with others. Quite on the contrary, they engage in activities such as negotiation, agreeing, disagreeing and questioning.

The problem is that to me it feels contextually wrong to put 'quite active' in that place. But teachers are keep saying that there's nothing wrong with the sentence. So I searched the internet for the original text and found that 'not passive' was replaced with 'quite active'. Here is the corresponding sentences from the original text:

The notion of ‘addressivity’ follows from the fact that people are not passive in their conversations with others. Quite on the contrary, they engage in activities such as negotiation, agreeing, disagreeing and questioning.

So is it okay to use 'quite active' instead of 'not passive' in this context?

Answer 1

Your opinion is correct. While it is true that quite active and not passive mean roughly the same thing, that is not the only consideration here.

The phrase on the contrary is crucial. We use it to indicate a contrast. In this case, activities such as negotiation, agreeing, disagreeing and questioning is being contrasted with passive. It cannot be contrasted with quite active.